In recent years, Korean education has increasingly emphasized a shift away from traditional multiple-choice assessments toward extended response assessments that can evaluate students’ higher-order thinking and conceptual understanding. This shift r...
In recent years, Korean education has increasingly emphasized a shift away from traditional multiple-choice assessments toward extended response assessments that can evaluate students’ higher-order thinking and conceptual understanding. This shift reflects a broader educational demand for assessment to function not merely as a tool for measuring achievement attainment, but as an educational instrument that enhances the quality of learning and provides meaningful feedback on students’ learning processes. However, in school practice, concerns have been raised regarding the reliability and fairness of extended response assessments, as well as their qualitative limitations.
The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a globally recognized educational program known for its fair and valid assessment system and has therefore attracted attention as a potential alternative for improving assessment practices in Korea. IB assessments systematically evaluate students’ mathematical thinking processes through problem design grounded in real-world contexts, the use of diverse command terms aligned with varying cognitive demands, scaffolded problem structures, and process-based marking. In this sense, IB assessments can be regarded as a concrete example of how the educational values underlying extended response assessments are realized through assessment tools.
Nevertheless, there is a lack of domestic research that empirically analyzes the specific characteristics of IB Diploma Programme (DP) mathematics extended response assessments and applies these characteristics to teachers’ actual assessment practices. Accordingly, this study was motivated by the need to analyze the key characteristics of extended response assessments as manifested in IB DP mathematics external assessments and to explore cases of teachers’ development of mathematics extended response assessment tools based on these characteristics, thereby providing practical implications for IB-based extended response assessment design.
This study aimed to analyze the key characteristics of IB DP mathematics extended response assessments and to explore how these characteristics are reflected in secondary mathematics teachers’ development of assessment tools. By applying the core characteristics of IB to extended response assessments in the Korean context, this study sought to derive educational implications and practical possibilities for enhancing the quality of extended response assessments and strengthening teachers’ assessment expertise.
To achieve these research purposes, the study addressed the following three research questions. First, what are the key characteristics of IB DP mathematics extended response assessments? Second, how are the characteristics of IB DP assessment reflected in secondary mathematics teachers’ development of extended response assessment tools? Third, what perceptions do teachers demonstrate during the process of developing IB DP-based mathematics extended response assessment tools?
This study was designed in two phases. First, the Phase 1 study analyzed external assessment items and markschemes from the IB DP course ‘Mathematics: Analysis and Approaches’ to identify five key characteristics of IB DP mathematics extended response assessments. Next, the Phase 2 study implemented an IB assessment workshop based on the findings from Phase 1 and examined changes in assessment tool development by collecting pre- and post-assessment design tasks from 13 secondary mathematics teachers. Subsequently, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight teachers to qualitatively analyze their perceptions and challenges experienced during the process of developing IB-based assessment tools.
Based on the first research question, the key characteristics of IB DP mathematics extended response assessments were identified as follows.
First, these assessments emphasize problem solving grounded in real-world contexts. The official IB DP mathematics guide defines problem solving as engaging with mathematical concepts across diverse situations, including non-routine problems, open-ended tasks, and real-life contexts. In this sense, IB DP assessment embodies an assessment philosophy that views mathematics as an exploratory tool connected to real life. Assessment items are designed to model concrete and realistic situations, focusing on students’ ability to translate and reinterpret everyday contexts into mathematical language.
Second, IB DP mathematics assessments employ a wide range of command terms. Specific command terms such as find, show that, and interpret clearly guide students’ expected actions during assessment and elicit different levels of thinking in a structured manner. Through the use of diverse command terms, the intent of assessment is made explicit, and students are encouraged to engage in higher-order thinking.
Third, the assessments are designed with scaffolded problem structures. Items consist of multiple sub-questions that are logically connected, with each sub-question building upon the previous one. This scaffolded structure functions as cognitive support in complex problem-solving processes and enables assessment for learning.
Fourth, IB DP mathematics extended response assessments require conceptual understanding. By allowing the use of calculators and formula booklets, IB DP places less emphasis on simple computational skills or memorization of procedural knowledge, and instead prioritizes deep understanding of mathematical concepts, as well as interpretation and reasoning based on conceptual understanding. Through assessment, IB DP promotes integrated, concept-based learning rather than fragmented knowledge acquisition.
Finally, IB DP mathematics assessments adopt process-based marking. Unlike result-based marking that focuses solely on final answers, process-based marking emphasizes students’ solution processes and reasoning. Beyond answer accuracy, assessment criteria incorporate methods, logical reasoning, and follow-through scoring that allows for the recognition of errors, thereby closely examining whether students demonstrate coherent reasoning and appropriate mathematical notation throughout the problem-solving process.
To address the second research question, the pre- and post-assessment tool development outputs of 13 secondary mathematics teachers were analyzed and categorized using four analytical criteria: (1) real-life contexts, (2) command terms and cognitive demand, (3) scaffolded problem structure, and (4) process-based marking. The categorization did not represent a one-dimensional spectrum of acceptance, but rather reflected how the characteristics of IB DP assessment were applied and recontextualized within teachers’ perceptions and assessment design practices.
First, in developing assessment tools grounded in real-life contexts, some teachers designed items so that inquiry emerged directly from the context, allowing the context to function as both the starting point and the core structural element of problem solving. Others incorporated context primarily as background material to enhance student motivation or to highlight the usefulness of mathematics.
Second, while pre-assessment tasks frequently relied on repetitive command terms such as calculate or explain, post-assessment tasks demonstrated attempts to incorporate a wider range of command terms, including analyze, interpret, and justify. Through the use of diverse command terms, some teachers designed assessment items to gradually extend students’ levels of thinking, while others focused on linguistic clarity so that the intended cognitive demands of the tasks were made explicit through the command terms themselves.
Third, whereas pre-assessment tasks often consisted of single, isolated questions, post-assessment tasks were more likely to adopt a scaffolded problem structure composed of multiple interconnected sub-questions. Some teachers constructed scaffolded structures with the explicit intention of providing cognitive guidance, directing students toward successive steps in the problem-solving process based on logical connections among sub-questions. Other patterns included using the scaffolded structure to subdivide procedural steps in problem solving or combining independent sub-questions to create extended and integrated tasks.
Finally, teachers attempted to move beyond accuracy-focused evaluation by adopting marking approaches grounded in the validity of solution processes and logical reasoning. Some teachers actively embraced process-based marking, recognizing logical continuity in students’ work so that minor computational errors did not disproportionately affect overall scores. Others perceived the clarification and refinement of marking criteria as a means of ensuring fairness and objectivity in assessment.
To address the third research question, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight teachers selected from the full group of research participants to explore their experiences in developing IB-based assessment tools. The analysis revealed that teachers experienced both external constraints and internal shifts in their assessment-related perceptions.
First, teachers reported feeling burdened by the introduction of new assessment approaches due to existing assessment practices that emphasize discrimination among students and a prevailing culture that prioritizes convenience through the use of result-based marking. As assessment is not an individual task, many teachers recognized that considerable effort would be required to persuade colleagues in order to implement IB DP assessment characteristics in school contexts. In addition, teachers expressed concerns that ensuring the authenticity of real-world contexts demands substantial time and effort, and that the use of realistic data and numerical values could lead to students’ computational errors or trigger complaints if the data do not accurately reflect real phenomena. Regarding command terms, teachers perceived them as intellectually stimulating; however, they also emphasized that systematic consensus-building and training for both teachers and students would be necessary prior to their effective implementation in the Korean educational context.
Second, teachers demonstrated positive changes in their assessment beliefs, reflecting a fundamental shift in how they conceptualized assessment. Whereas assessment had previously been viewed primarily as a means of determining achievement attainment, teachers began to recognize assessment as a process that can promote learning and extend students’ thinking. In particular, teachers positively perceived the scaffolded problem structure and process-based marking grounded in follow-through principles as approaches that provide meaningful challenges for students at varying levels and enable assessment for learning. Furthermore, the clarification of command terms and the IB-based, fine-grained process-based marking schemes were recognized as practical alternatives for enhancing fairness and reliability in assessment.
These findings indicate that the characteristics of IB assessment can bring about substantive changes in secondary mathematics teachers’ design of extended response assessments and demonstrate its educational potential to transform assessment into a process of learning. This study empirically identified the distinctive characteristics of IB assessment and applied them to teachers’ assessment tools development, thereby exploring how the philosophy of IB assessment could influence mathematics assessment practices in Korea.
The significance of this study lies in its proposal of a fair, reliable, and practice-oriented model for improving the quality of mathematics extended response assessments by adapting the philosophy and structural characteristics of IB assessment to the domestic assessment context. It is hoped that the analytical criteria for IB-based mathematics extended response assessment tool development and the identified patterns of teacher change presented in this study will be extended to diverse areas of mathematics education, further developing concrete models in which assessment functions as an educational tool that supports student learning.