Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Education
Efficient Assessment Of Students’ Proportional Reasoning, Michele Carney, Katie Paulding, Joe Champion
Efficient Assessment Of Students’ Proportional Reasoning, Michele Carney, Katie Paulding, Joe Champion
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
Teachers need ways to efficiently assess students’ cognitive understanding. One promising approach involves easily adapted and administered item types that yield quantitative scores that can be interpreted in terms of whether or not students likely possess key understandings. This study illustrates an approach to analyzing response process validity evidence from item types for assessing two important aspects of proportional reasoning. Data include results from an interview protocol used with 33 middle school students to compare their responses to prototypical item types to their conceptions of composed unit and multiplicative comparison. The findings provide validity evidence in support of the score …
Developing A Multi-Dimensional Early Elementary Mathematics Screener And Diagnostic Tool: The Primary Mathematics Assessment, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Evelyn S. Johnson, Keith W. Thiede, Sam Strother, Herbert H. Severson
Developing A Multi-Dimensional Early Elementary Mathematics Screener And Diagnostic Tool: The Primary Mathematics Assessment, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Evelyn S. Johnson, Keith W. Thiede, Sam Strother, Herbert H. Severson
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
There is a critical need to identify primary level students experiencing difficulties in mathematics to provide immediate and targeted instruction that remediates their deficits. However, most early math screening instruments focus only on the concept of number, resulting in inadequate and incomplete information for teachers to design intervention efforts. We propose a mathematics assessment that screens and provides diagnostic information in six domains that are important to building a strong foundation in mathematics. This article describes the conceptual framework and psychometric qualities of a web-based assessment tool, the Primary Math Assessment (PMA). The PMA includes a screener to identify students …
Assessing Teacher Attentiveness To Student Mathematical Thinking, Michele B. Carney, Laurie Cavey, Gwyneth Hughes
Assessing Teacher Attentiveness To Student Mathematical Thinking, Michele B. Carney, Laurie Cavey, Gwyneth Hughes
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
This article illustrates an argument-based approach to presenting validity evidence for assessment items intended to measure a complex construct. Our focus is developing a measure of teachers’ ability to analyze and respond to students’ mathematical thinking for the purpose of program evaluation. Our validity argument consists of claims addressing connections between our item-development process and the theoretical model for the construct we are trying to measure: attentiveness. Evidence derived from theoretical arguments in conjunction with our multiphased item-development process is used to support the claims, including psychometric evidence of Rasch model fit and category ordering. Taken collectively, the evidence provides …
The Effects Of Professional Development On Elementary Students’ Mathematics Achievement, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Keith W. Thiede, Sam Strother, Dan Jesse, John Sutton
The Effects Of Professional Development On Elementary Students’ Mathematics Achievement, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Keith W. Thiede, Sam Strother, Dan Jesse, John Sutton
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
This paper describes the effects of a professional development (PD) program – Developing Mathematical Thinking – on student achievement. Six Title I elementary schools with similar demographics, within one school district, were chosen to participate as either a treatment or comparison school. Three schools were chosen to participate in professional development that incorporates effective PD recommendations. All the teachers had to participate in all aspects of the PD, thereby eliminating potential self-selection bias. Using the state standardized achievement test as the before and after measure, results suggest improved student performance after professional development was implemented over a two year period.
The Relationship Between High-School Mathematics Teachers' Beliefs And Their Practices In Regards To Intellectual Quality, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Michelle B. Carney
The Relationship Between High-School Mathematics Teachers' Beliefs And Their Practices In Regards To Intellectual Quality, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Michelle B. Carney
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
This study examines the relationship between mathematics teachers’ beliefs and instructional practices related to learning, pedagogy, and mathematics in regards to components of intellectual quality for eight high-school mathematics teachers. Research has demonstrated that the higher the degree of intellectual quality for instruction is rated the higher student achievement is on standardized assessments. The findings in this study demonstrate a consistent pattern between teachers espoused beliefs and their instructional practices. Even though teachers’ practices changed as they wrote curricular units to be more in line with intellectual quality characteristics, their beliefs stayed consistent over an 18 month period and were …
Expect The Unexpected When Teaching Probability, Karen Koellner, Mary Pittman, Jonathan L. Brendefur
Expect The Unexpected When Teaching Probability, Karen Koellner, Mary Pittman, Jonathan L. Brendefur
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
Probability has recently made its way into many textbook series and standards documents (NCTM, 2000; NGA, 2010). When students engage in probability problem solving many unexpected situations can arise due to the counterintuitive nature of probability concepts. These situations can be difficult for students and challenging for teachers to analyse during teaching. Recently, as facilitators of a Mathematics Science Partnership grant workshop on probability, we had the opportunity to engage middle school teachers in professional development workshops as well as in their classrooms. In this article, we discuss a rich probability task used with these teachers along with two scenarios …
A Glimpse Into Secondary Students’ Understanding Of Functions, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Gwyneth Hughes, Robert Ely
A Glimpse Into Secondary Students’ Understanding Of Functions, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Gwyneth Hughes, Robert Ely
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
In this article we examine how secondary school students think about functional relationships. More specifically, we examined seven students’ intuitive knowledge in regards to representing two real-world situations with functions. We found students do not tend to represent functional relationships with coordinate graphs even though they are able to do so. Instead, these students tend to represent the physical characteristics of the situation. In addition, we discovered that middleschool students had sophisticated ideas of dependency and covariance. All the students were able to use their models of the situation to generalize and make predictions. These findings suggest that secondary students …