Researcher and Practitioner Perspectives on Co-Designing a Diagnostic Mathematics Assessment System in a Trading Zone

• In Event: Partnering With Practicing Teachers to Strengthen Inclusive Instruction Using Learning Trajectories

Abstract

In this paper we describe the journey of making the fundamental knowledge of mathematics learning trajectories (LTs) accessible to middle school teachers for the purpose of strengthening learner-centered instruction and equitable personalization (Authors, 2017). The project team’s primary strategy was to drive instructional change through designing and implementing a valid and reliable digital, diagnostic assessment system that would provide teachers and students intuitive, fine-grained data on student progress on LTs. We used agile software development methods to design and revise multiple versions of the assessment software through a collaboration of learning scientists, software engineers, practitioners, and psychometricians (Author, 2019a). Authored jointly by the learning scientists and the district supervisor, this paper reports on a design-based implementation (DBIR) project (Fishman, Penuel, Allen, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2013) that evolved over four years of partnership and collaboration among them.
In recognition of the fact that each group brings its own perspectives to the project and that design decisions inevitably involve trade-offs: balancing opportunities, resources, and risks, we refer to our collaborative process as “ a trading zone” (Author, 2019b; Lehrer, 2012). Members of this trading zone are viewed as independent experts, positioned within their own disciplinary communities of practice and dedicated to building creative and useful innovations. We give priority to data-driven results and conduct on-going validation processes to ensure data quality. Being true to one’s positioning looking both inward and outward involves negotiating issues of time, accountability, feasibility, and priority. We have encountered several challenges, set backs, and successes over the course of the collaboration, and through it all remained dedicated to our shared goal of improving student understanding in mathematics.
We illustrate the range of challenges and solutions through three contrasting examples involving intensive interactions and competing points of view. The first entails the negotiation of content and its structure on the learning map relative to district’s scope and sequences, the second involves the shift in the range of tests across the elements of the map to narrow the content focus and give classes identical items, and the third example describes how the practice feature evolved and changed to support classroom routines. We seek to show that in order to develop a reliable and trustworthy trading zone, it is necessary for members to carefully consider innovation, sustainability, and scalability. It requires the combination of working through deep conceptual issues and building robust channels for communication and timely decision-making, that serve the iterative design process. One constant challenge is to push the field, respect the demands of practice and research, while offering proven and beneficial learning outcomes for students.

Authors

• Jere Confrey, North Carolina State University

• Meetal Shah, LearnPlatform