college of education | fall 1998

Balanced Assessment Seeks To Provide Greater Understanding of Students’ Subject-Matter Knowledge

For Sandy Wilcox and her colleagues, it is clear that reform in K-12 mathematics must include new assessment tools.

You can set new standards, develop new curriculum, but without altering how you assess student work, reform is incomplete, said Wilcox, an associate professor of teacher education at the College of Education.

So since 1992, Wilcox and her colleagues at U.C. Berkeley, Harvard, and at the University of Nottingham in England have been actively developing new assessments and working with teachers and administrators. And what began as an effort to develop new performance assessment tasks has evolved into a nearly $3 million National Science Foundation-funded project known as the Mathematics Assessment Resource Service (MARS) that seeks to empower teachers, administrators and others throughout the nation to use these new tools to improve teaching and learning.

"We have made sure that we have created a collection of tasks that covers this range of what we call ‘phases of problem solving,’" Wilcox said. "Generally, multiple choice questions fall into the range of transforming and manipulating. What we want to do is performance assessment cuts across ranges of mathematical processes, including modeling and formulating, inferring and drawing conclusions, checking, evaluating and reporting.

"Then you can really see what students can really do."

‘A Lever for Reform’

Balanced assessment takes off where multiple choice ends.

The idea is that having a student perform a task, be it a word problem that applies to a real-world situation or a mathematical investigation, can provide greater understanding about subject-matter knowledge than picking the right answer from four options.

The balanced part refers to the fact that this kind of assessment can be tailored to gauge a broad range of student performance.

The initial NSF-sponsored project in 1992 was known as Balanced Assessment (BA). What the project did was develop assessment tasks from elementary through high school. The grant provided for four teams of designers headed by Alan Schoenfeld at UC Berkeley, Judah Schwartz at Harvard, and Hugh Burkhardt at the Shell Center for Mathematical Education at the University of Nottingham. Wilcox headed MSU’s efforts and focused on developing tasks at the middle school level.

As the team worked to develop the many assessment tasks, one of the underlying principles was that these tools could be used even in schools or districts where teachers were not using reform curriculum.

The new assessment could serve as a "lever for reform."

"Teaching to a test doesn’t have to be a bad idea," Wilcox said. "It depends on the test. If you are teaching to multiple choice tests…, then you are going to get a limited kind of instruction. But if you are teaching to a test that is trying to give kids an opportunity to show not only what they know but what they can do, then teaching to that kind of test could be a good move."

The Next Phase

In the end, the project produced 18 packages filled with assessment tasks. They covered the various grade-levels beginning at third and going through to the last year of high school. Eight packages, two at each level, were published by Dale Seymour Publications.

Sandy Wilcox

Near the end of their work, it became clear to everyone that they needed to take the project to the next level. That meant getting schools and districts to use the assessment tools they had developed.

The project went back to NSF for more funding. This time they renamed themselves the Mathematics Assessment Resource Service and submitted a proposal to the foundation. NSF officials liked the idea but were unsure. Was there a market for this kind of assessment? Would districts want to work the assessment team?

The foundation gave the team a $200,000 planning grant to go out and find clients and prove that it was worthy of full funding.

The team did just that.

Among the clients it worked with were the New York and Detroit public schools, and it took on projects in Texas and California. In summer of 1997, the MARS team wrote another proposal to NSF.

This time the foundation funded the project for nearly $3 million over four years.

MARS, which is based at the College of Education, now has a long line of clients waiting to work with it in places like Connecticut, Rhode Island, Kentucky and Colorado.

Among MARS’s strengths, Wilcox said, is that it can custom tailor assessments for clients. "We don’t have a test that we pull off the shelf and sell. What we do is sit down with a client and say, ‘Okay, what’s been your focus? What is it that you would like to monitor?’" It also works closely with clients on issues of test scoring and the reporting.

Indeed, professional development is a key aspect of MARS.

The MARS strategy is to focus on teacher leaders and curriculum administrators who can disseminate the information throughout a school or system. In doing that, MARS teams work closely with educators on a wide-range of issues from helping them reconsider what mathematical performance means and exploring task types to examining video and other documentation of students’ efforts and supporting implementation of standards-based curricula.

"A significant amount of work in MARS is professional development," Wilcox said.

For Wilcox, who now heads MARS, the work has been gratifying. She believes balanced assessment will help teachers, but the ultimate result she hopes for is that it will help students.

"I want it to make a difference for all students, particularly those who historically have been so poorly served," she said. "In order for this to make a difference for kids, there first has to be some change in what teachers believe about mathematics, what they believe their role is as math teachers, and what they believe about kids and what they can do.

"I want to help reshape the beliefs that teachers have about these things and I want to help develop a practice that is more in line with those new set of beliefs. I’m optimistic that we have developed the materials, resources, and ways of working with professionals that will help support that goal."

Back to Contents