Assessment in the Context of Mathematics Instruction Reform: The Design of Assessment in the Quasar Project

Abstract

Recent reports on mathematics education reform have focused the attention of educational practitioners and policymakers on new goals for mathematics education and new descriptions of mathematical proficiency. QUASAR is a national project (Quantitative Understanding: Amplifying Student Achievement and Reasoning) designed to improve the mathematics instructional program for students attending middle schools, grades 6 through 8, in economically disadvantaged communities. QUASAR is a complex research study of educational change and improvement, in which a major effort will be made to study carefully different approaches to unblocking the path to mathematical power for poor students. Parallel goals for the study are: to ascertain conditions that appear conducive to mathematical success; to derive pedagogical principles for effective mathematics instruction for middle school students; to describe effective instructional programs that are adaptable to other schools; and to devise new assessment tools to measure growth in higher order thinking, reasoning, and communication as they relate to school mathematics. Included in this report are: (1) an introduction that describes the purpose, the rationale, and the goals of this project; (2) a discussion of the educational considerations and mathematical conceptualizations underlying the proposed methods of assessment for mathematical proficiency; (3) a discussion of construct-irrelevant test variance as a data-gathering consideration for the assessment of mathematical proficiency; (4) a discussion of the development of specifications for the assessment tasks in terms of focus and components; (5) a discussion of the specifications encompassing the scoring rubrics within the assessment procedures; and (6) a list of sample tasks and administrative information. (15 references) (Author/JJK)