Examining the factors affecting middle school teachers' attitudes towards formative assessment

Formative assessment is an approach that aims to make a learning plan that best meets the learning needs of the student by identifying these needs during the process. In Turkey, it has started to be used in the education and training processes with the constructivist education philosophy. This type of assessment, which can be examined from different perspectives such as student, teacher, and school climate, is specifically addressed in this study through the attitudes of teachers towards formative assessment. For this purpose, a scale was developed to measure the attitudes of middle school teachers towards formative assessment. The validity and reliability study of the scale was conducted, and as a result, it was determined that the scale consisted of two dimensions: "approach" and "application." With the developed scale, the factors affecting teachers' attitudes towards formative assessment were examined from various perspectives. In the "approach" dimension, significant differences were found between teachers' having received formative assessment training, the belief that assessment materials will improve students' learning abilities, the difficulty of focusing on formative assessment practices, the program graduated from, positive changes observed in students, the level of knowledge of formative assessment, and the perception of increasing workload. In the "application" dimension, significant differences were found between teachers' enjoyment of their profession, interest in their field, good communication with administrators, satisfaction with the school they work at, and the level of knowledge of formative assessment. Lastly, a multiple linear regression analysis was performed to ascertain the relative importance of the variables.