Tools for early assessment in mathematics

Guidance and advice for high-quality assessment practices. Provides teachers with specific information to target the learning needs of students. The Insight Assessment Platform is aimed at helping teacher assess the progress of all learners and support more targeted teaching practices.

This online platform can be accessed by teachers in government schools. Resources, supports and tools, on the platform support high quality assessment practices and provide teachers with information they can use to target the learning needs of students as they progress along the learning continuum. The Scaffolding Numeracy in the Middle Years SNMY resource allows practitioners to access assessment materials, the Learning and Assessment Framework for Multiplicative Thinking LAF , learning plans, authentic tasks and research findings from the project that investigated a new assessment-guided approach to improving student numeracy outcomes in Years 4 to 8.

The LAF helps bring together all of the key ideas, strategies and representations of multiplication and division needed to work confidently with whole numbers, fractions, decimals and percent across a wide range of contexts.

It's linked to the rich assessment tasks used to evaluate multiplicative thinking and contains explicit advice on teaching implications. The Assessment for Common Misunderstandings ACM tools are based on series of research-based Probe Tasks which were developed for teaching purposes to identify learning needs in Number.

The Probe Task Manual includes a number of tasks and resources which are organised to address common misunderstandings. Our website uses a free tool to translate into other languages.

This tool is a guide and may not be accurate. For more, see: Information in your language. You may be trying to access this site from a secured browser on the server. Please enable scripts and reload this page. The program includes five to six separate student booklets per level, along with a teacher guide, assessment resources, and student tutorials available online or via CD-ROM.

An Optional Online Assessment Management System provides educators with the ability to manage test assignments and generate reports. Overview Brochure. Math Flaps, Teaching Guide. Math Flaps, Teaching Guide: Spanish. Math Flaps, Math Worksheets. Analytic Procedure To construct, refine, and validate the final measures for each task, a three phase process was conducted. Phase 2 - Item reduction The purpose of the second phase was to reduce the number of items that contributed to each task while maintaining the discriminating ability of each task over the ability continuum.

Phase 3 — Measure Validation The final measures, developed from the analyses in Phases 1 and 2, were used in these analyses only utilizing participant Sample 2. Results Phase 1 - Differential Item Functioning To test for differential item functioning, separate CFA-with-covariate analyses, one for each task, were conducted.

Phase 2 - Item reduction The percentage of children who answered each item correctly, item-total correlations, discrimination parameters, difficulty parameters for each task, and whether or not each item was retained for the final version of the task are presented in Table 3.

Cardinality This task was tied directly to the one-to-one counting task. Subitizing No subitizing items had overlapping difficulty scores. Table 4 Percent correct, difficulty parameters, and whether or not the item was retained on the final measure for the Verbal Counting task.

Summary of Measure Development As a result of the item refinement process, all tasks were reduced to between 3 and 9 items.

Figure 1. Table 5. Table 6 Correlations between the final versions of each early numeracy task. Verbal Counting - 2. One-to-one Counting. Counting a Subset. Numeral Comparison. Set Comparison. Number Order. Numeral Identification. Story Problems. Number Combinations. Preliminary Evidence of Concurrent and Predictive Validity As seen in Table 7 , with few exceptions, all tasks were significantly correlated with the same tasks given a year later.

Table 7 Correlations between the individual tasks at Time 1 and Time 2, and between the individual tasks at Time 1 and Time 2 with two broad mathematics measures at Time 2. Discussion Through the measure development process in this study, 12 early numeracy skills were constructed and evidence of reliability and preliminary evidence of validity were established.

Practical Applications of the Measures Classroom As teachers have little time available in their day to focus on non-instructional components Darling-Hammond, —particularly for learning to administer and utilizing new assessment tools—the brevity and ease of use of these measures makes them ideally suited for classroom instructional settings.

Research Beyond the classroom setting, these brief measures also have two key practical applications in research settings that apply to the development of an early mathematics RtI system: a improving curriculum effectiveness and b assessing the effectiveness of newly developed targeted interventions.

Age-based Analyses of the Measures Although the majority of the developed tasks exhibited strong predictive relations with the same task administered one year later, there were two tasks that functioned differently than expected.

Limitations Although the tasks were psychometrically strong and good predictors of later mathematics, several limitations should be noted. Conclusions Overall, the development of these measures provides a platform from which to build future research in early mathematics development—particularly regarding building the framework and capacity for validating an RtI system for preschool.

Appendix Example process for administering the one-to-one counting task. Footnotes 1 A standard error of. Contributor Information David J. Developmental dynamics of math performances from preschool to grade 2. Journal of Educational Psychology.

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Itasca, IL: Riverside; Support Center Support Center. External link. Please review our privacy policy. Children were presented with a set of dots and asked to count the set. Cardinality b c e. This task was assessed in the context of the structured counting task. Children were presented with a specific quantity of objects e. Subset: 3, 4, 8, 16, 20 Category: 3, 4, 8, 16, Children were briefly presented 2 seconds with a set of pictures and instructed to say how many dots or pictures were presented.

Numeral Comparison b c d e f. Children were asked to identify which of four numbers was the biggest or smallest. Set Comparison a b e f. Children were presented with four sets of dots representing different quantities. Number Order b c d f. Children were shown a number line with one number missing. Children were presented with flashcards of all numbers from 1— On the first three items in this task, children were presented with a numeral at the top of the page and four sets of dots below.

Dots to numerals: 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12 Numerals to dots: 4, 5, 7, 8, 8,