A most basic and long standing conern of philosophers, psychologists, and educators is the probblem of knowledge elicitiation and represntation. How do we assess and represent an individual's knoledge? Philosophers, when asking these questions, have usually expressed an interest in general or world knowledge. Pschologists and educators, on the other hand, have often been more internerestedin the problem of assessing and representing a person's knowledge of some particular topic or area. It is this problem , as it arises in the assessment of classroom types of knoledge, that is the concern of the present chapter. Knowledge assessmetn and representation, as carried out in the classroom, appears as a relatively straghtforward matter. Knowledge is assessed by simply asking factual questions and is represented by presenting the indicidual's relatice standing in terms of a percentile. We begin with a critique of this conventional approach to assessing and representing classroom knowledge.
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