Assessment

Even when chemistry teachers’ beliefs about assessment design align with literature-cited best practices, barriers can prevent teachers from enacting those beliefs when developing day-to-day assessments. In this paper, the relationship between high school chemistry teachers’ self-generated “best practices” for developing formative assessments and the assessments they implement in their courses are examined.

High school chemistry teachers will often establish goals that guide assessment design and interpretation of assessment results. However, little is known about how these goals and the assessment design collectively guide the interpretation of results. This study seeks to better understand what teachers notice when interpreting assessment results and how the design of the assessment may influence teachers’ patterns of noticing.

Designing high school chemistry assessments is a complex and difficult task. Although prior studies about assessment have offered teachers guidelines and standards as support to generate quality assessment items, little is known about how teachers engage these supports or enact their own beliefs into practice while developing assessments. Presented in this paper are the results from analyzing discourse among five high school chemistry teachers during an assessment item generation activity, including assessment items produced throughout the activity.

Think alouds are valuable tools for academicians, test developers, and practitioners as they provide a unique window into a respondent’s thinking during an assessment. The purpose of this special issue is to highlight novel ways to use think alouds as a means to gather evidence about respondents’ thinking. An intended outcome from this special issue is that readers may better understand think alouds and feel better equipped to use them in practical and research settings.

Response process validity evidence provides a window into a respondent’s cognitive processing. The purpose of this study is to describe a new data collection tool called a whole-class think aloud (WCTA). This work is performed as part of test development for a series of problem-solving measures to be used in elementary and middle grades. Data from third-grade students were collected in a 1–1 think-aloud setting and compared to data from similar students as part of WCTAs. Findings indicated that students performed similarly on the items when the two think-aloud settings were compared.

Response process validity evidence provides a window into a respondent’s cognitive processing. The purpose of this study is to describe a new data collection tool called a whole-class think aloud (WCTA). This work is performed as part of test development for a series of problem-solving measures to be used in elementary and middle grades. Data from third-grade students were collected in a 1–1 think-aloud setting and compared to data from similar students as part of WCTAs. Findings indicated that students performed similarly on the items when the two think-aloud settings were compared.

Instruments designed to measure teachers’ knowledge for teaching mathematics have been widely used to evaluate the impact of professional development and to investigate the role of teachers’ knowledge in teaching and student learning. These instruments assess a mixture of content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. However, little attention has been given to the content alignment between such instruments and curricular standards, particularly in regard to how content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge items are distributed across mathematical topics.

The development of inclusive STEM high schools that have no academic admission requirements has been a national goal in the United States. However, there is no umbrella organization that gives guidance for structuring such schools. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a self‐assessment using critical components of successful inclusive STEM high schools for school personnel and educational researchers who wish to better understand their STEM programs and identify areas of strength. A multi‐phase methodology was employed.

Problem solving is central to mathematics learning (NCTM, 2014). Assessments are needed that appropriately measure students’ problem-solving performance. More importantly, assessments must be grounded in robust validity evidence that justifies their interpretations and outcomes (AERAet al., 2014). Thus, measures that are grounded in validity evidence are warranted for use by practitioners and scholars. The purpose of this presentation is to convey validity evidence for a new measure titled Problem-Solving Measure for grade four (PSM4).