In this edition of Assessment News, Charles Darr uses a case study from the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) to highlight how students can benefit from activating deliberate thinking in assessments. The key message underscores the value of using assessment information to generate insights that inform better teaching and…

In this article, the role of digital feedback that was provided in an outdoor mathematics education setting is taken into consideration. Using the app MathCityMap (2020) in the context of a mathematics trail, the influence of positive and/or negative feedback is examined in relation to how it influences the processes of verification and…

Problem-oriented teaching (POT) activities are important in classroom instruction. The level of student response can be influenced by different teacher behaviours in POT. However, the characteristics of teachers' multimodal behaviours at different levels of response are unclear. This study applied epistemic network analysis to explore the…

This study explores the use of the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), a neuro-fuzzy approach, to analyze the log data of technology-based assessments to extract relevant features of student problem-solving processes, and develop and refine a set of fuzzy logic rules that could be used to interpret student performance. The log data that…

This paper examines the process of instrumental genesis through which students develop their proficiency in making use of movable points and slider bars--two tools that dynamic mathematics software provides for working with variable coordinates and parameters in the field of functions. The paper analyses students' responses to task sequences…

There are many reasons to believe that open-ended (OE) and multiple-choice (MC) items elicit different cognitive demands of students. However, empirical evidence that supports this view is lacking. In this study, we investigated the reactions of test takers to an interactive assessment with immediate feedback and answer-revision opportunities for…

This paper reports on the reflective practice of a group of nine secondary mathematics pre-service teachers. The pre-service teachers participated in a year-long, school-based professional experience program which focussed on observing, co-teaching and reflecting on a series of problem-solving lessons in two junior secondary school mathematics…

This is the report of an investigation in partnership with a team of junior secondary classroom teachers of the potential of posing more challenging tasks to their students. A range of data sources are used to represent the experience of teachers and students in a unit of work that incorporated a range of challenging tasks. Students learned the…

Key to renewed concern on the affective domain of education (Fensham, 2007) and on school graduates' readiness for a world of work (DEST, 2008; WDA, 2006) is the student's inclination-to-reflect when engaged in a learning or problem-solving task. Reflective learning is not new to education (Dewey, 1933; Ellis, 2001). Since the…

This article investigates the effect of the vitality of historical issues in collective memory on students' history learning processes and products. Forty 12th grade students of different ethnic background participated in two historical problem-solving learning tasks. The historical issues were found to differ in their vitality in collective…

There is evidence that spontaneous learning leads to relational understanding and high positive affect. To study spontaneous abstracting, a model was constructed by combining the RBC model of abstraction with Krutetskii's mental activities. Using video-stimulated interviews, the model was then used to analyze the behavior of two Year 8 students…

According to Kilpatrick (1987), in the mathematics classrooms problem posing can be applied as a "goal" or as a means of instruction. Using problem posing as a goal of instruction involves asking students to respond to a range of problem-posing prompts. The main goal of this article is a classification of mathematics questions created by Years 8…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…