Assessment In Mathematics Education

Question 2

Introduction

The importance of assessment in education and particularly in mathematics education has received much attention from educational policy makers, researchers in mathematics and mathe matics teachers in many countries. This has been going on for the last few decades.

There have been a global belief that performance assessment have more pedagogical value than the traditional multiple-choice tests. This can be used to reflect students achievement more precisely. According to NCTM, assessment can be define as “the process of gathering evidence on a student’s knowledge, the ability to use, and his/her disposition on mathematics and towards implementing inferences from the evidence for a

There are two aspects of the open-endedness of a problem which include (a) different access of solutions and (b) multiple acceptable answers. It is more challenging to solve open-ended problems than close-ended ones. This is especially in the students school work which requires higher-order thinking.

In fact, these two areas that is being discussed are to a large degree lacking in traditional assessment tasks. It has to a certain extent been receiving criticism for the last decades.

This resulting in all the performance tasks being used in this study are prepared in contextualised, to a different degree and in real-world scenarios. There are other ways to approach these tasks which can be concluded with a variety of answers.

The following is an example of a performance task which is authentic and can be used in the local social

Descriptive statistics (e.g. frequency and percentage) was applied to

describe students’ overall perceptions about mathematics and mathematics learning.

Mann-Whitney U tests were used to examine the possible differences between the two

classes of students in each survey for the researchers to detect the impact of using

performance tasks on the experimental students attitudes. Students working in the two performance task tests were graded based on task-specific rubrics by two independent researchers. The inter-rater reliability was

calculated by the Intra-class Correlation Coefficient (ICC) on absolute agreement. As a result, the reliability on three performance criteria (i.e., Approaches, Solutions, and

Representation) over the three tasks for the two tests ranged from 0.98 to 1.00, with

an average being 0.99. The rubric base grades from the performance task tests were analysed using descriptive statistics. It is able to investigate students overall performance at class levels before and after the intervention period which has the same analysis for the questionnaire data.

Mann-Whitney U tests were employed to identify possible

differences between the experimental and comparison classes in each