Assessment resources for teachers in French-speaking Switzerland

An intercantonal approach

Abstract

This article presents the PistEval, a website which provides to teachers from the French-speaking part of Switzerland some assessment resources for French and Mathematics for grade 8 (pupils of 11-12 years old). They aim to support teachers in developing their assessments, whether they are used for diagnostic, formative or certification purposes. The tasks proposed on this website are accompanied by theoretical, didactic, and methodological scaffolding. First, we outline the content of the PistEval, their aims and the context of the project in which they are used. Next, we describe the process used and the actors involved in its development. We then focus on their scaffolding, that we describe in more detail. After that, we discuss the elements that facilitated the implementation of the PistEval, as well as the difficulties encountered. Finally, we come back to the main contributions of the project, namely the definition of some common assessment principles for French reading comprehension and problem solving in Mathematics, as well as the reflections proposed. We also discuss the perspective of the PistEval, which is to develop teachers’ assessment practices so that they serve the pupils’ learning.