Last night while typing focus group data into my palm pilot I watched a program on PBS titled The Trouble with Testing. My interest in this area is in the potential for using mathlets for alternate forms of evaluation. I believe that they could be used to record solution paths followed and student reasoning. In addition, they could be use to archive artifacts created using mathlets. Moreover, they could be used to assess performance as opposed to recognition. Bottom line, they could assess different things than multiple choice questions (pretty much the only type of question can reliably be graded electronically) do. In addition to the standard fare of response types TADRIOLA will allow teachers to create questions with the following response types: (1) record an image of the state of a mathlet so the teacher can judge it, (2) automatically judge the state of a mathlet based on teacher supplied criteria, (3) nicely formatted equations, (4) share the state of a mathlet with other students.
I know that well constructed multiple choice questions can do a good job of assessing many things, but my suspicion is that we can do more and differently using mathlets. Anyway, these ideas seem to have a place in what Popham calls work samples and performance-task test items.
Posted on August 13th, 2003 by joel
Filed under: interactive online math
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