6 - Assessing and Evaluating Students' Work

Summary

The mathematics course that we envision utilizes a variety of assessment techniques, including team home- work, projects, student presentations and writing assignments. A common element of these assessment practices is the clear and precise communication of mathematical ideas.

In many cases, students are expected to work cooperatively – to produce a single piece of work representing the collective efforts of three or four students. In order to provide sufficient challenge for a group of students and sufficient incentive for the students to work cooperatively (instead of simply dividing the work among themselves, and later compiling their individual contributions for submission) the problems assigned are more complicated, and are sometimes more “open-ended” than exercises typically assigned in traditional mathematics classes. The problems assigned typically require students to make appropriate assumptions, to try alternative avenues of inquiry, to try to understand the mathematics more thoroughly by recognizing its application to otherwise unfamiliar situations, etc.

The work that students produce on these more complicated assignments is not simply pages of algebraic manipulations with boxed answers at the end. Instead, students are encouraged (and helped) to exhibit their understanding of the mathematics in multiple ways (such as graphs, written accounts of their assumptions and reasoning processes), instead of simply recording the algebraic steps that they performed.

As may be expected, assessing and grading student work of this kind can be radically different from assessing and grading pages of algebraic manipulations with a conveniently highlighted answer at the end.