Traditional testing techniques (particularly those used in national or regional examinations) emphasize competitive perspectives of assessment where the main purpose is to differentiate between students for selection or relative ranking purposes (Suggett, 1985). For ranking purposes, information about knowledge possessed by individual students is largely irrelevant. The crucial dimension for both candidate and the examining authority is the position on the rank-order list. Such assessment approaches do not inform either the candidate (whether successful or not) or the teacher (whether past or future) about the level of conceptual development that has been reached or about the possible next steps in the learning process. This report describes some innovative assessment strategies used to explore conceptual development and to describe achievement in terms of the tasks that candidates can do (or not do) rather than in terms of rank order. Such mapping of a set of mathematics results provides more useful information for the parties to the assessment.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education