Observing to evaluate: primary school and the challenge of change

Abstract

The paper focuses on the Ministerial Decree 172/2020, that recently replaced numerical grades with a descriptive judgment in the Italian primary schools. What has been really changed, it is not merely the practices of assessment, but the overall approach to evaluation:  from an assessment of learning to an assessment for learning. This change forced the schools to develop processes of reflection on their instructional habits and strategies. The Decree set as the object of the evaluation the learning process, examined through 4 dimensions. For this purpose, the observation - usually rarely practiced in schools - becomes an important resource for collecting evidence on which to build descriptive judgments.  We discuss a research-training path which has been developed through teachers’ involvement, especially focused on formative assessment and observation.