Abstract:

In order to improve the quality of teaching as a profession, teacher preparation programs have implemented performance assessments to evaluate how teacher candidates plan, teach, and assess student learning in a classroom setting. To get teaching credential in California, for example, multiple-subject teacher candidates should pass the requirements of edTPA performance assessment in elementary literacy and mathematics. The elementary mathematics assessment task focuses on developing or adapting a relevant formative assessment of student learning, analyzing student work samples, and designing a re-engagement lesson. In assessing students’ mathematical learning, teacher candidates mostly focus on the correctness or completeness of answer but often have difficulties with developing a rubric to measure conceptual understanding of the specific mathematical topic.

This study examines how preservice teachers develop a scoring rubric to assess students’ conceptual understanding and how they score the student work samples using the rubric. After rehearsing the elementary mathematics assessment task of edTPA in an elementary mathematics methods course, preservice teachers were asked to develop a four-level scoring rubric for the given fraction multiplication word problem and to score five hypothetical students’ written work samples at the end of semester. In this study, I analyzed 47 preservice teachers’ rubrics and their scores assigned to the five students’ work samples. The rubrics created by preservice teachers are characterized as generic (not specific to the mathematical topic measured by the formative assessment task), incoherence across different performance levels, having gaps or overlaps between different performance levels, focusing on the correctness of answer, and checking the presence of models or representations rather than addressing the conceptual ideas behind multiplying fractions. They mostly agreed on whether the given student work sample demonstrated lower (level 1 or level 2) or higher (level 3 or level 4) level of conceptual understanding but did not agree on the specific level of conceptual understanding.

Keywords:

Performance assessment, scoring rubric, preservice teachers, conceptual understanding, multiplication of fraction.