Communicating Quantitative Literacy: An Examination of Open-Ended Assessment Items in TIMSS, NALS, IALS, and PISA

Abstract

Quantitative Literacy (QL) has been described as the skill set an individual uses when interacting with the world in a quantitative manner. A necessary component of this interaction is communication. To this end, assessments of QL have included open-ended items as a means of including communicative aspects of QL. The present study sought to examine whether such open ended items typically measured aspects of quantitative communication, as compared to mathematical communication, or mathematical skills. We focused on public-released items and rubrics from four of the most widely referenced assessments: the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS-95): the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS; now the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, NAAL) in 1985 and 1992, the International Adult Literacy Skills (IALS) beginning in 1994; and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) beginning in 2000. We found that open-ended item rubrics in these QL assessments showed a strong tendency to assess answer-only responses. Therefore, while some open-ended items may have required certain levels of quantitative reasoning to find a solution, it is the solution rather than the reasoning that was often assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]