Assessment

Professional development projects aim to improve student learning by directly impacting teachers. However, the work of teachers (and thus the potential impact of professional development) is often impacted by a number of policy and context-related factors. This poses a challenge not only in programming designed to impact teachers, but also to the ability to detect these impacts through rigorous research designs.

In this session, four projects will share their work on formative assessment and mathematics learning trajectories, and participants will discuss the implications for formative assessment practices in mathematics.

Work in secondary mathematics education takes many approaches to content, pedagogy, professional development and assessment. This session aims to illuminate the richness of hte content of secondary mathematics and the field of secondary mathematics education by sharing two such approaches and reflecting on the differences and commonalities between the two.   

“Solution diversity” has been proposed as one key characteristic that distinguishes engineering design from other disciplinary pursuits. Engineering designers recognize that for any design problem, there will be multiple acceptable solutions, and informed designers have been found to strive for “idea fluency” through divergent thinking techniques that assist them in exploring the design space (Crismond & Adams, 2012).

In contrast to evaluative research that uses accountability measures, improvement science research (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015), using practical measures is designed to provide practitioners with frequent, rapid feedback that enables them to assess and adjust instruction during the process of implementation. The resulting data is potentially of use to multiple stakeholders. For example, practical measures can orient teachers to attend to key aspects of the classroom that might be invisible to them.

This session aims to open up a conversation about of how games can be used for formative assessment and how data from digital games can inform classroom teaching.

The Computing Research Association’s report from an NSF-sponsored workshop describes seven next steps for data-intensive research in education: