Elementary Math Assessment Project (EMAP)

Project Director: Dan Hickey

The Elementary Math Assessment Project is refining and testing new multi-level modes of classroom assessment, with funding from the US National Science Foundation. Co-investigators include Mitzi Lewison from IU's Language Education Department and Denise Mewborn from the University of Georgia's Mathematics Education Department.

Across three annual design research cycles (2005-2008), innovative classroom assessments and formative feedback routines are being refined in fifth-grade classrooms in two schools in the Monroe County Community School Corporation. The project is developing and refining two levels of classroom assessments and using them to align the existing Everyday Mathematics curriculum to the Indiana Core 40 mathematics standards and the corresponding ISTEP achievement test. In this process, the project is using and refining new situative theories of learning, language, assessment, feedback, and motivation.

Ten informal "activity-oriented" quizzes are being developed for each unit in the existing Everyday Mathematics Curriculum. After completing the assessments, teachers and students collaboratively review their work using students-oriented formative feedback rubrics, while working to improve classroom mathematical discourse and individual understanding. At the end of each semester, semi-formal "curriculum-oriented" exams are completed, which teachers and students use to further refine discourse and understanding, and to participate in formal remediation.

By the third year of the project, all of the fifth-grade teachers in the two schools are expected to be using the materials. Their improvement in mathematical discourse, understanding, and achievement across the school year will be compared with all of the fifth graders at two similar schools MCCSC schools where the materials were yet to be used.