Reform in School Mathematics and Authentic Assessment

Book excerpt: Today new ways of thinking about learning call for new ways for monitoring learning. Reform in School Mathematics builds from the vision that assessment can become the bridge for instructional activity, accountability, and teacher development. It places teachers in key roles while developing the theme that we cannot reform the way in which school mathematics is taught without radically reforming the ways the effects of that teaching are monitored. Among others, this volume addresses the issues of the specification of performance standards, the development of authentic tasks, the measure of status and growth or a combination, the development of psychometric models, and the development of scoring rubrics. The new models proposed in this book give teachers a wealth of nontraditional assessment strategies and concrete ways to obtain measures of both group and individual differences in growth.