Working mathematically to revitalise assessment

Abstract

The dominance of outcomes-based approaches to education has put more pressure on teachers than ever before to ensure that students meet expected or mandated outcomes. Teachers must be able to identify their students' current mathematical knowledge and understanding, and know how to intervene in order to ensure their students' development towards the outcomes. Typically, however, mathematics outcomes defined by curriculum statements provide few indications of students' partial understanding, and this is especially true of working mathematically outcomes. One approach to this difficulty is to design assessment tasks against an identified developmental continuum, and to assess students' progress using a scoring rubric to link the underlying continuum with the task. Such an approach has the potential to integrate assessment, teaching and learning in such a way that teachers can make dependable and defensible judgments about their students and plan appropriate further intervention.