a) Participant Profile

For the referred study, characterizing the total sample of five family members/caregivers of students with intellectual disabilities, a variation of 45 to 60 years of age was observed among the investigated. As for the degree of kinship of the family members/guardians interviewed, it became evident that four sample members correspond to the mothers of the people with intellectual disabilities, and only one refers to a grandmother.

The interviewees’ education level revealed the highest number (three) among those who had studied up to incomplete elementary school. This was followed by one complete high school graduate and one incomplete college graduate.

The students, the public of the sample corresponding to family members/guardians of people with intellectual disabilities, are aged between 9 and 17. Among those surveyed, all revealed that the student’s disability is congenital. Regarding the year in which the person with an intellectual disability is enrolled in regular school, it was verified that the students in the sample are between the 4th and 9th grades. Regarding the age of entry into regular schools, it was noticed a variation between 2 and 4 years, all in early childhood, demonstrating the clarification of families about the importance of education as a right for all.

b) Evaluation of teaching-learning from the perspective of the investigated

When asked about the repetition of students, it was revealed that no student in the sample repeated the year in regular education, a fact that portrays the current educational policy anchored in the possibility of specific termination for those who cannot reach the level required for the completion of elementary school, due to their disabilities (BRAZIL, 1996, 2001).

To investigate the assessment during the Covid-19 pandemic period (2020-2021), it was necessary to identify how the assessment was before this period in regular schools. We obtained a strong testimony regarding the discrepancy between the evaluation instrument and the learning stage of the person with intellectual disabilities:

He takes tests, and they give 6,7, but the boy does not know how to do anything. He does not know how to read. He does it his way: he sees, he does, but do not tell him to read, he does not know, he does not know (F1).

About the other statements on this issue, the respondents highlight the situation experienced by the students:

It was the test and the report card (F2).

Report. She even took the exam, but the final evaluation was through a report, “ne” (F3).

He did not have a report card. I know it was a report: they just put ten, ten, ten, but the boy did nothing (F4).

The evaluation only made him cross out, he made some letters that he did not know what “it” was, but he did it “right,” his way, the tests. There were grades, congratulations, and good or excellent grades (F5).

Assessment of learning is intended to support learning. In this aspect, it is conceived as a procedural, formative, dialogical action with an inclusive emphasis for all students. Thus, the act of evaluating goes through the verification of reality through diagnostic evaluation, which allows the delineation of the limitations and initial possibilities of the students. The initial survey needs to be analyzed qualitatively and contextually so that it is possible to qualify the data revealed, relating them to the teacher’s expectations for a specific reality. Only before these facts and with the purpose of using the assessment as a learning component can the teacher then make decisions in the face of the reality evidenced, outlining methodologies, objectives and building pedagogical practices consistent with the universe presented (PEREIRA; MELO; NASCIMENTO, 2021; ^{HOFFMANN, 2019} ; ^{LUCKESI, 2018} ).

In the case of the participants’ answers, it is crucial to understand that the diagnostic assessment plays a similar role in the didactic functioning, not constituting an end in itself but serving to control the students’ work and manage the flows, being useless if it does not promote appropriate pedagogical action. Assessment, in the formative logic, understood as a source of regulation of learning processes, contributes to this because it allows the deliberate intervention of the teacher, inducing a regulation in the course of this process; and, in the summative or certifying logic, acquires the function of taking stock of student acquisitions and decide for their approval or not for subsequent stages of the teaching program ( ^{PERRENOUD, 1999} , ²⁰¹⁵ ).

Regarding diagnostic observation, with a view to formative assessment, the author reiterates:

[...] means that it considers everything that can help students learn better: their acquisitions, which condition the tasks that can be proposed to them, as well as their way of learning and reasoning, their relationship with knowledge, their anguishes and possible blockages in the face of certain types of tasks, what makes sense to them and mobilizes them, their interests, their projects, their self-image as a subject more or less able to learn their school and family environment. ( ^{PERRENOUD, 2015} , p. 49).

^{Perrenoud (2015)} also emphasizes the importance of no longer separating assessment and teaching, considering each learning situation as a source of information or valuable hypotheses to delimit teaching-learning and student performance more successfully. In formative assessment, the teacher meticulously observes the students, seeking to understand their way of functioning in order to adjust, in a more systematic and individualized way, his or her pedagogical interventions, providing a minimum of class regulation, inferring on the learning processes.

From the perspective of formative assessment, the teacher requires a posture that does not end in instrumentality but an active positioning and planning of an intentional teaching methodology for learning. ^{Perrenoud (2015)} emphasizes that what is important in the democratization of teaching is not to make it as if everyone has learned but to allow everyone to learn.

Therefore, it is paramount to center the teaching process on the student, developing diversified activities at each learner’s level, with a permanent focus on achieving learning. In ^{Hoffmann’s (2019)} view, learning acquires a mediating conception by referring to the discovery of the reason of things and presuming the organization of the experiences lived by the subjects in a progressive understanding of notions.

According to ^{Depresbiteris (2007)} , criteria are principles that will serve as a basis for judging the quality of performances, understood here not only as the execution of a task but as the mobilization of a series of attributes that converge towards it.

c) Evaluation procedures and instruments used in the Covid-19 period

The relatives/guardians described how the evaluation took place in the regular school for people with intellectual disabilities during the pandemic. Some students made the evaluations because the relatives/guardians bought the printed activities at school and gave them to their children and grandchildren to do at home and then returned them:

I went to school to pick up his “assignments,” and he would dothem at home (F1).

He received those tests, right, I received them and took them home, we tried to do it at home, and I helped him because he could not read or write, then I gave him the tips, and there were also tips for the group, but he is very “difficult” to interact in this part.

They sent activities to cover, dot the letters, and repeat and paint (F4).

Concerning the evaluative practice carried out in the online mode, the interviewees reported that:

[...] The activities were online for her. The teacher sent activities; we did them (F3).

It was by... what do you call it, video, it was just working, it was the math teacher who sent work, math worksheets, what do you call them, ...is to paint, paint and look for the “drawing,” the “numbers,” these things. He would send it to me via Zap, and I would send him a copy. The other teachers did not “team” sending them, so I even asked why, then they said they thought he was normal because they did not know him, I do not know what, then they even kept sending him some “works.” (F5).

The exposed data suggest that the practice of home-printed activities was a means of carrying out the assessments in regular schools and the online format. However, except for the math teacher who provided an intentional and differentiated service, as stated by F5, it can be inferred that, for people with intellectual disabilities, there is no confluence between assessments and the teaching-learning process. This is evident when students excel in these activities with slight variation in evaluative instruments, such as paintings and drawings, dissociated from a pedagogical practice consistent with the dialectical movement between doing and thinking about doing ( ^{TEIXEIRA; NUNES, 2010} , ²⁰¹⁴ ).

When inquiring with the research sample about how the regular school dealt with the family regarding the results of the student’s evaluation during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020-2021), it was reported that two family members/guardians had no feedback, with identical responses echoed: “They did not say anything” (F1 and F4).

These data denote more than a mere silence of the regular school; they infer the “neutrality” that curtails the rights to the educational process guaranteed by the Brazilian legislation, detonating the family/guardians’ helplessness regarding the evaluation process.

The survey revealed that two family members/guardians went to the regular schools to inquire with management about the feedback from the evaluations:

I went there to find out how he was doing his situation. “Then they told me that everything is in his own time and that he was evolving, but not much, right, that he could not fail, that he should be patient, that everything would be in his own time (F2).

I went to the school and talked to the principal, and he told me to do whatever I could, and after the pandemic, they would go after the damage (F3).

Only one person revealed having received feedback from the regular school during the Covid-19 pandemic period (2020-2021) through the recording of a grade, a model still valued by family members to the detriment of the qualitative aspect: “They gave a report card: “it is here,” I got it, “it is great,” good grade” (F5).

Family members/guardians were asked about the participation of people with intellectual disabilities in external assessments⁴ . Respondents F3 and F4 said that no external assessment was carried out; they just answered positively:

He took a test at school, which he said the teacher told him to do. He came home and said: “Grandma, there was a test we had to take on Thursday, but I took it there. I asked him how he did it: ‘I do not know, but I did it there. He does not know; he does not know. He told me that I had to go because it was a test, and nobody could miss it (F1).

Yes, he evaluated that; he did Prova Brasil (F2).

[...] he did the SPAECE. (F5).

^{Hoffmann (2019)} asserts that it is impossible to say that an assessment was made only by observing the student or correcting his tasks, tests, or even the record of these results. Only these elements do not constitute an evaluation because the essential element is missing, the mediating action, the pedagogical intervention essential for the student’s evolution, favoring his or her progress and learning. In order to systematize the evaluation process, the forms of returning the results to the students must be programmed, as well as the subsequent mediating strategies.

In this aspect, ^{Hoffmann (2019)} makes considerations about the ineffectiveness of assessing the student during watertight moments that do not allow for capturing the dynamics of the student’s learning process, considering that all students always learn and learn more with better opportunities for this purpose. Thus, the subjects investigated to show that the regular school teacher has not yet taken the leading role in the evaluation of teaching-learning focusing on the person with intellectual disabilities, their natural limitations, and, above all, possibilities, through the implementation of diagnostic assessment practices, able to identify learning difficulties and make use of this information to support the student’s learning.

It is worth mentioning that, to probe the difficulties related to the teaching-learning assessment of students with intellectual disabilities through their families/guardians of the researched sample, questions were related, evidencing the daily life of this public concerning the assessment in regular school during the investigated period.

When asked about the difficulties encountered in assessing student learning in regular school during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020-2021), the following accounts were given:

It did no good (F1).

Despite the difficulty, I went there to get some assignments “for me” (F2).

It made no difference (F4).

I went to the school and talked to the principal and the coordinator because they were not sending him individual work, and they said they did not know him. It seems that they kept changing teachers. He has “been” there since the fourth grade, he has everything in his folder, and he has already fought about the caregiver, he says he does not need a caregiver there, but he needs a person to look at his handwriting and so on. After that, it got much worse; he could not write like before (F5).

During the Covid-19 pandemic period (2020-2021), the legal guidance was that the learning assessment would be carried out through written or online activities according to the content worked during the special regime of non-contact classes. However, F1 points out that the evaluation process carried out in this period in regular school was null for the student with intellectual disabilities, indicating that the family was not welcomed by the regular school, as suggested by F5, which reveals the student’s ignorance of the school, which should be inclusive, stressing that the fact of being enrolled is not indicative of inclusion; that is, the practices need to be readjusted for the effectiveness of the inclusive process ( ^{BRASIL, 2020} ).

The speeches of the students’ relatives or guardians denote that the evaluation practice was not connected to the content explored by regular education, as the legal dictates recommend ( ^{FORTALEZA, 2020} ):

Inclusion is a very flawed inclusion; you do what you can. At the beginning of 2020, her teacher never prepared a specific activity for her, and I questioned her, and she also has a special child, and she told me that she did not know her grade. So, I told her how she would know if she was not interested. Then she would come to tell me that I was not sending her activities, and she would get no grades and no attendance. I told her: so, give her a grade, and then I will come here to talk to you because how can she do an activity that is not being prepared for her? Then she arrives at the end, and there is no way to make an evaluation; there was no learning; it was two years there that the learning was what the mother taught her (F3).

The statement of F3 is very strong when analyzing the inclusive process in regular school during the pandemic, emphasizing the importance of knowing the student to evaluate the teaching-learning process, besides dissociating the evaluation process from examining the production of grades.

Regarding the perspective of quality in education, it is worth noting:

Quality is a broader attribute; it is the value of the condition of things or people that are seen beyond simple perception, which occurs in greater or lesser intensity, perfection, and depth. Regarding school performance, quality represents coherence, the precision of ideas, depth of argumentation, creativity, originality, students’ ways of feeling and acting, and complex aspects that cannot be reported through numbers or grades.( ^{HOFFMANN, 2019} , p. 46).

According to ^{Vianna (2014)} , evaluation cannot ignore the various dimensions of the school context because of its influence and the particular emphasis on the definition of different evaluation proposals, whose major objective, in the end, without any uncertainty, focuses on improving the educational procedure.

^{Beyer (2010)} expresses pertinent considerations about the core of inclusion within education:

The first condition for inclusive education does not cost money: it requires a new way of thinking. We need to understand that children are different from each other. They are unique in the way they think and learn. All children, not only those with some limitation or disability, are unique. Therefore, it is also wrong to demand the same performance from different children and treat them uniformly. Education must be organized to consider children’s different abilities ( ^{BEYER, 2010} , p. 28).

In this context of Inclusive Education, it is worth reflecting on the concept of disability. ^{Diniz (2007)} analyzes disability as a complex concept that recognizes the body with injury and denounces the social structure that oppresses the disabled person. Thus, research unveils one of the most devastating ideologies in our social life: the one that humiliates and segregates the disabled body. In this sense:

Injury for the Social Model of Disability is equivalent in gender studies of sex. Furthermore, just as the gender role of each sex is a result of socialization, the signification of injury as a disability is a strictly social process. Along this line of reasoning, the explanation for a disabled person’s low educational level or unemployment should not be sought in the restrictions caused by the injury but in the social barriers that limit the expression of their abilities. ( ^{DINIZ, 2007} , p. 2).

From ^{Diniz’s (2007)} perspective, disability is recognized as a political concept: the expression of the social disadvantage suffered by people with disabilities. It is pertinent to emphasize that there is no way to consider that a child with disabilities can have the proper pedagogical care without a sufficient distinction between their cognitive and learning characteristics.

In this conception, the school, in the context of diversity, immediately requires changes in pedagogical actions in the classroom, arising from an educator contextualized with the inclusive proposal, in which teacher training assumes contours of resizing pedagogical practices, to ensure a conception and implementation of education in line with the legislative proposal of Inclusive Education ( ^{SILVA et al., 2020} ). It is up to the training programs to present qualitative changes that can provide new possibilities for educators to interact qualitatively with multiplicity in regular classrooms. It is necessary to break with the precepts that establish a linear sequence of contents that culminates in the valorization of the accumulation of contents and the valorization of the classificatory and excluding evaluative activities ( ^{BEYER, 2010} ; ^{LUCKESI, 2018} ; ^{TEIXEIRA; NUNES, 2010} , ²⁰¹⁴ ).

The evaluation of teaching-learning in school and the use of its results can be an essential resource for social democratization in the understanding of a satisfactory Education for all students. It is important to reflect on the path of the person with intellectual disabilities within the scope of regular education and develop public policies from this perspective, which are efficient and meaningful for the overall development of the subjects involved ( ^{VALENTIM; OLIVEIRA, 2013} ).