Affordances of Using Task-Based Interviews to Assess How Third Graders Think About Time

• In Event: Evolving Approaches to Classroom Assessment

Abstract

The goal of formative assessment (Black &Wiliam, 1998a, 1998b; Black et al., 2014) is to help reveal student thinking with the purpose of identifying students’ nascent understandings and building on them. This paper examines how task-based interviews can reveal and deepen third-grade students’ mathematical thinking about the concept of time and its representation. Preliminary results show how students reasoned about the intricacy of a clock’s motion, grappling with the meaning and placement of the hour hand. More importantly, students also drew on their in-school and out-of-school experiences to make sense of word problems in the interview, revealing information consequential to their mathematical learning but would not be visible in formal, summative assessments.

Author

• Xinyu Wei, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author