Assessment for Math

This semester, Marilyn Treder and Don Baldus volunteered to guide (drag/ harass/ hound) the math department into the world of assessment. Along with the science and English departments we are attempting to pilot a method to assess student learning. Our goal: assess whether the (mathematical) critical thinking abilities of our Math 0098 students have improved during this semester.

Critical thinking is one of the ten Minnesota Transfer Curriculum (MnTC) Theme areas – more specifically, we have been concerned with measuring MnTC student competency 2a: Students will be able to gather factual information and apply it to a given problem in a manner that is relevant, clear, comprehensive, and conscious of possible bias in the information selected. A brave and game group of Math 0098 instructors agreed to play along.

Our method has been to:

1.) administer the same story problem to the participating Math 0098 students and then grade it using a 5-point scoring rubric.

2.) six weeks later administer a very similar, albeit slightly more difficult, story problem and grade it against the same rubric.

3.) Use this comparative data to determine if students’ ability to solve story problems (ie, think critically) has improved.

One of the first things we discovered was that it was hard to come up with a problem that was relevant, clear, comprehensive, and conscious of possible bias let alone determine if our students can apply their knowledge in the aforementioned fashion. Undoubtedly, we have a long way to go but the attempt continues to generate much thought and discussion and this will most certainly lead to improvements in how we assess.