Abstracts - Earli

three different countries (Crahay & Marcoux). To what extent can we speak about "assessmentcultures"? How to define them? What are the relations between these cultures and the curricularmaterials used by the teachers, their everyday classroom practices, and the decisions of graderetention and social promotion? To what extent do we note contradictions, conflicts, coherence,co-construction? What are the impacts on students’ learning and on their school failure andsuccess? Which strategies of change can we conceive? The scientific aim of the symposium is toinvestigate social and cultural dimensions of the classroom assessment through teachers’discourses, tools that are used, and professional practices in school settings. On a practical level,the symposium is aimed at producing knowledge that would be useful for supporting deep changesof practices and cultures of assessment.Formative assessment practices situated in classroom microculturesLucie Mottier Lopez, University of Geneva, SwitzerlandIt is generally acknowledged that learning gains are possible when formative assessment isintroduced into classroom practices. But as stressed by Black and Wiliam (1998), it is essentialthat each teacher finds his or her own way of incorporating formative strategies into his or her ownpatterns of classroom work. We will argue that the norms and practices of classroom microcultures(Yackel & Cobb, 1996) are important contextual factors for this incorporation. In our paper, wewill focus on the interactive regulations of formative assessment based on the exchanges betweenthe teacher and the student(s) (Allal, 1988). The integration of interactive regulation within aninstructional activity allows continuing adaptations of learning as it takes place. Taking intoaccount the "social norms" of the classroom microculture allows to investigate in detail the natureof teachers’ feedback and adaptations of learning. Our main research questions are the following:which strategies of interactive regulation does the teacher use when observing difficulties ofstudents during problem-solving activities? What are the relations between the social norms of theclassroom microculture and the nature of the interactive regulations guided by the teacher? Ourresults concern two third-grade classes in mathematics education. We will discuss the kind ofinteractive regulation displayed by each teacher in relation with the social norms of her/hisclassroom microculture. We will show how the formative assessment practices of both teacherspromote more or less a shared responsibility of the assessment with their students. Interpretativehypotheses will be formulated concerning the impact on the learning gains.Inconsistent cultures of foreign language evaluation: When teachers find themselves tangled up byconflicting values and objectivesFrancoise Raby, IUFM & LIDILEM Universite Stendhal de Grenoble, FranceFrancoise Campanale, IUFM & LSE Universite Pierre Mendes France de Gren, FranceThis empirical qualitative research dealt with the "assessment culture" of three French languageteachers coming from different secondary schools and with different professional careers, whosought to implement the new pragmatic approach to language learning recommended by theEuropean Framework. This approach consists in setting up "pragmatic" tasks in which the foreignlanguage is learnt in order to communicate in socially meaningful situations, such as thoseafforded by the Internet, and the assessment procedures should follow these new lines. To whatextent has this new culture of assessment reached those French teachers? Did the fact that theyresorted to ICT pedagogy influence their assessment theories and practice? In order to bringelements of answers to these questions we shall borrow from the current international theories ofassessment, particularly the French-speaking school, which emphasizes the need for explicitevaluative criteria pertaining to tasks, competences and the distinction between assessment and– 57 –