Pre-service teachers’ professional development and mathematics large-scale assessment

This research aims at investigating the knowledge and beliefs of a sample of Italian secondary school mathematics pre-service teachers (PSTs) regarding the INVALSI national large-scale tests. The units of analysis are the PSTs’ answers to an online questionnaire, in which some items taken from the past INVALSI national tests are proposed and discussed individually by the participants, and the collected data are framed with the Mathematics Teacher Specialised Knowledge (MTSK) model (Carrillo-Yañez et al., 2018). The main purpose of the research is to identify the educational needs of the study sample, to then use them as a starting point for the construction of a model for teachers’ professional development based on an innovative bottom-up approach. Results show evidence of beliefs and many different aspects of PSTs’ knowledge, categorised in the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) domain of the MTSK model.