Abstract
TASK (Teachers’ Assessment of Student Knowledge) is an online assessment designed to measure teacher’s capacity for learning trajectory-oriented formative assessment in mathematics, specifically through their ability to analyze student work and make instructional decisions based on that work. In this chapter, we begin by articulating the conceptual framework behind learning trajectory-oriented formative assessment and describing the instrument, scoring rubrics, and ongoing development of TASK. We then present the results of a large-scale field test of TASK, both in terms of the overall results and additional studies of the properties of the instrument. Evidence suggests that this new instrument yields reliable and valid scores of teachers’ formative assessment capacity in mathematics, is feasible for widespread use in a variety of settings, provides useful reporting of results, and can be used to better understand specific aspects of teacher knowledge. We draw on the results of this field test to investigate the relationships between various dimensions of teachers’ ability to analyze student work in mathematics and their instructional decision making.
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Notes
- 1.
As Ball et al. (2008) point out, determining whether a students’ thinking is mathematically sound requires a kind of knowledge that a person with strong knowledge of mathematics content who is not a teacher may not necessarily possess. It is therefore distinct from common content knowledge.
- 2.
Thousand two hundred and sixty-one fully completed TASKs in five content areas were analyzed from this field test. Responses to the geometry TASK have not yet been analyzed.
- 3.
For example, the latest version of the TASK for multiplicative reasoning includes some multiple choice questions to augment the open ended prompt for Instructional Decision Making.
- 4.
We are mindful that score reliabilities for the TASK are still under investigation and that correlations may be underestimated in the presence of measurement error (i.e., attenuation) (Lavrakas, 2008).
- 5.
We do not include the domains of content knowledge or concept knowledge in this analysis as we do not expect them to have as strong of an influence on instructional decision making.
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Ebby, C.B., Sirinides, P.M. (2015). Conceptualizing Teachers’ Capacity for Learning Trajectory-Oriented Formative Assessment in Mathematics. In: Middleton, J., Cai, J., Hwang, S. (eds) Large-Scale Studies in Mathematics Education. Research in Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07716-1_8
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