Assessment

This session provides a forum for discussion around issues of alignment between programs, their learning goals, and the measures for assessing program effectiveness. The session seeks to offer ideas and strategies on how to tackle these kinds of issues.

The session addresses a common challenge in research—the tension between the need for using existing measures to ensure that research results can be compared across studies and the need for using measures that are well-aligned with a program’s learning goals to assess treatment effects.

The goal of this session is to assist other project teams in the design and testing of game-based mathematics products. The session includes a discussion of recently completed randomized control trials of the Math Snacks games. Participants leave with concrete ideas on designing and testing e-learning products designed for classroom use with a focus on middle school concepts.

Algebraic habits of mind, at the core of five of the Standards for Mathematical Practice, become both a potent and appealing intervention for at-risk algebra students and a solid prevention-model middle-school course either to accelerate algebra or to ensure success in a later algebra course. The session focuses on the habits of mind in that context, in related professional development work that addresses the Standards for Mathematical Practices, and on assessment of algebraic habits of mind in teachers.

The Next Generation Science Standards present important shifts for science teaching, assessment, and curriculum materials—focusing on core explanatory ideas, a central role for science and engineering practices, and coherence across time and science disciplines. These challenges for practice require new theoretical advances.

The goal of this session is to discuss possibilities, progress, and problems in using learning progression research to support improved assessment and instruction in middle school and high school classrooms.

In this session, several learning progression-related DR K–12 projects share findings and discuss questions around two issues:

In Assessing Secondary Teachers’ Algebraic Habits of Mind, the project team is developing tools to study the following questions: What are the mathematical habits of mind (MHoM) that secondary teachers use, how do they use them, and how can we measure them?

In this session, presenters share a paper-and-pencil assessment being developed to measure how teachers use MHoM when they do mathematics for themselves. The presenters also share classroom video and a preliminary framework for examining MHoM in teaching practice.