Today there is a lot of interest in assessment, including classroom assessment, in educational research. A search on the abstracts to the EARLI (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction) conference 2009[1] for the term ”assessment”, gave more than 300 hits[2] out of approximately 1700 abstracts (EARLI, 2009). This means that more than one sixth of the contributions to this general learning and education conference had a strong connection to assessment. One cause for this interest is that learning and assessment are strongly linked, that is, how assessment is done has impact on student’s learning (e.g. Gipps, 2001; Pettersson, 2007; Shephard, 2000). Since at least Black & Wiliam (1998), there has been a call for classroom studies in depth in this area, and there still is (e.g. Hattie 2009).
This paper takes it departure in a tentative literature review focused on definitions and boundaries in classroom assessment in general through a search on Libris[3] (Björklund Boistrup, 2009). In the present paper I direct the interest solely towards classroom assessment in mathematics education. The study investigates (1) to what extent there are articles with an articulated focus on classroom assessment in journals of mathematics education. The aim is also to (2) find how classroom assessment is conceptualised within the mathematics educations field, that is, within what boundaries the articles are positioned. In order to find some answers to these questions, I perform a new literature review, this time focussing on two journals, Educational studies in mathematics (called ESM in this paper) and ZDM The International Journal on Mathematics Education (called ZDM). Further on, similar reviews will be performed for other journals in the field of mathematics education. When performing this review, I use the analytical structures, concerning boundaries of assessment, used in and derived from the earlier review. By this, I discuss aspects such as possible mathematics classroom situations, and students’ and teachers’ roles in mathematics classroom assessment. I also describe to what extent institutional aspects are included in the literature.