Developing Enhanced Assessment Tools for Capturing Students' Procedural Skills and Conceptual Understanding in Math

Co-Principal Investigator: Cohen, Allan

• Researchers designed oral assessment methods and found that the oral assessments tapped more sophisticated problem-solving skills of students with math disabilities than the paper-pencil tests.
• In one condition, teachers used technology-assisted prompts to assess student performance and remediate errors (Fractions at Work, Technology-Assisted Prompts [FAW-R]). In the comparison condition (Fractions at Work, Basic Intervention [FAW-B]), teachers gave students the same items for assessing progress but used their own methods of reteaching. Most student performance scores increased from pretest to posttest, which suggests that the FAW methods were effective.
• Although there was a wide variation in the performance among students who profited from instruction and those who did not, there were no statistically significant differences between the two experimental conditions.
• Additional analyses suggest that scores from all students together (regardless of intervention method) showed significant gains on all three mathematics outcome measures, with effect sizes ranging from small to large. This supports the use of the basic instructional program curriculum researchers had used in prior studies.
• There were no significant differences between the FAW-B and FAW-R groups. Although teachers in the FAW-B group did not have access to the technology-based enhancements in FAW-R, they used their own, informal ways of monitoring each student's progress. The advantage of small class size in the resource rooms afforded teachers opportunities to assess their students' thinking and make appropriate adjustments to their instruction.
• Formative and summative assessments can help teachers provide more effective instruction for low-performing students in math. Teachers demonstrated the ability to use the item misconceptions identified in the developed assessments to remediate their students' computation skills.

Measures: The research team produced fully developed versions of the Interactive Computer-Based Test (ICBT), a Formative Fractions Assessment (FFA), and a Diagnostic Fractions Computation Test (DFCT). The ICBT assesses students' problem-solving skills and includes interactive item and information clusters, tracking features, and information for teachers. Both the FFA and DFCT are computer-administered measures of students' fraction understanding with interactive features and detailed feedback provided to teachers on student understanding and student errors.