Investigating the Weaknesses, Strengths, Opportunities, and Threats of Descriptive Evaluation in Mathematics

This study aimed to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of descriptive evaluation in the fourth-grade mathematics of primary school in the city of Saqqez. In this descriptive study, the research population included all the fourth- grade teachers of primary school in the mentioned city in the academic year of 2017-2018. As the sample, 130 teachers were selected using simple random sampling method. The data was collected using a researcher-made questionnaire which included 58 items in a five-point Likert scale (very high, high, somewhat, low and very low). The content validity of the questionnaire was approved by the experts and its obtained reliability, using the test re-test method, was 0.94. The data, descriptive measures, one-sample t-test, and Friedman test, was analyzed using SPSS-24 software. The results indicated that the descriptive evaluation has a number of important strengths, including the anxiety reduction of mathematics exams in students. The most important weaknesses in the implementation of this evaluation are the high number of students in the class and the lack of most parents' confidence in this evaluation method. Its most important opportunity is increasing the morale of participation among students. Meanwhile, descriptive evaluation faces noticeable threats, such as the lack of feasibility for accurate comparison between students in terms of their learning and progress. The findings also revealed that there is no significant difference between the views of male and female teachers concerning the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of descriptive evaluation.