PROCEEDINGS OF THE 23RD ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2020
Boston, Massachusetts
Aligning assessment with instruction in a creativity in mathematics course
Page: 1203
Assessment is a central issue to the lives of educators and students. The purpose of assessment is to certify achievement or to facilitate learning (Boud, 2000). At all levels, from programmatic to course-specific, we strive to assess in a way that accurately measures achievement or progress relative to one’s goals. In this poster, we describe our experiences assessing students in an undergraduate mathematics course focused on creativity in mathematics. While traditional forms of assessment often focus on repeating mathematical procedures and demonstrating abilities of routine skills (Firestone, Winter, & Fitz, 2000; Lesh & Clarke, 2000), we attempted to align assessments with the alternative instruction we employed. Here we describe our assessments and report on preliminary findings of students’ reactions to the assessments through reflective journal entries, focus group interviews, and pre- and post-course surveys, outlining a need for revisions to traditional assessments.