I’m sorry I can’t be at the ISEB project kickoff meeting because of Covid. On this page I have collected some materials and insights -in raw form- that I was going to use for my talk.
Firstly, let me say that it is great that this project will be trying to push forward the quality of mathematics assessments. Although in my heart I would like such assessment items to be as open and wide-ranging as possible, as to fully facilitate the development of both conceptual and procedural knowledge, the current technological state-of-the-art only manages to do that in some places. I was going to show some examples of innovative assessments ‘in real time’, but now I will just say that novel assessments in time might be able through games (for example see Dragonbox, but also see some of the challenges here), platforms like Numworx (you can log in with a guest account and see some of the open tasks) or assessment methods like ‘comparative judgement’.
However, these are not practical at scale. To be able to improve assessment at scale, we need to both improve technology AND assessment items. In this project we work on improving assessment items and validate them, starting by improving the assessment practices and items that we have. In exploring these issues, I think the following themes and issues are relevant.
While designing mathematics assessment items, it’s fine to, of course, have items for all stripes. Some items will address more factual, ‘knowing’ questions, others more ‘reasoning’ tasks. In the remainder of the day, you will aim to design assessment items that require more cognitive processing, initially as multiple choice questions.