Starting with Assessment Using Probes to Identify Prior Knowledge and Uncover Misunderstandings

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Starting with AssessmentUsing Probes to Identify
Prior Knowledge and Uncover Misunderstandings

• Jill Rosenblum
• Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance
• jrosenblum_at_mmsa.org [phone]

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Introductions

• Who are you?
• What is your role?
• What do you hope to get out of this session?

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Outcomes

• Familiarity with assessment probes for
  mathematics
• Opportunity to look at student work and consider
  instructional implications

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Thanks to the work of my colleagues

• Cheryl Rose
• Leslie Minton
• Carolyn Arline
• forthcoming book
• Uncovering Student Thinking in Mathematics
• from Corwin Press

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Purposes for Assessment

• Diagnostic
• Formative
• Summative
• What are the differences
• In approach?
• In data?
• In uses?

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Data-Driven Dialogue Approach

• Phase 1
• Activating and Engaging
• Surfacing assumptions, making predictions, asking
  questions
• Phase 2 Phase 3
• Exploring Discovering Organizing
  Integrating
• analyzing the data generating inferences
  and implications

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Phase 1

• Activating and Engaging
• Surfacing assumptions
• Making predictions
• Asking questions
• Complete the Task
• Make predictions

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Phase 2

• Exploring and Discovering
• Analyzing the Data
• Tally Student Responses
• List rules used

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Phase 3

• Organizing and Integrating
• Generating inferences and explanations
• Analysis of Findings
• Look at Teacher Notes

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What is a Probe?

• Diagnostic assessment probes are designed to
  uncover student understandings and
  misunderstandings and the results are used to
  inform instruction (rather than make evaluative
  decisions)
• Uncovered understandings include both conceptual
  and procedural knowledge

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What are Mathematical Misunderstandngs?

• Conceptual and Procedural Knowledge
• Common Errors
• Overgeneralizations

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How are Probes Structured?

• Elicitation and Elaboration
• Distracters based on research
• Elicitation Formats
• Selected response
• Multiple selections response
• Example and non-examples lists
• Opposing views

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Look at Student Work

• What misunderstandings do the distracters elicit?
• What are the primary methods students used to
  solve the problem?
• How often do the correct answers result?

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Looking at Student Work continued

• What student methods are considered outliers?
• Which of the methods are more efficient?
• Based on the sense of the class what
  instructional strategies are effective for this
  learning target?

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Teacher Notes

• Questions to focus a teacher on why a particular
  probe may be useful
• Uncovering understanding by giving the probe to
  students
• Examine student work
• Seek additional research findings
• Teaching implications

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Next Steps

• What was helpful?
• Who will you tell?
• What will you do?