Click here for information about the 2003 MARS Summer Workshop Series.

Dale Seymour have published BA Assessment Packages for Elementary, Middle, Higher and Senior Grades.

School districts and states across the US are engaged in a process of standards-based reform. They recognize that progress depends on their assessment program matching the new and broader curriculum goals, focused on students developing mathematical power; this means moving to include performance assessment.

The Mathematics Assessment Resource Service, works with districts and states on performance assessment design and implementation, and on professional development for designers and teachers. The aim is to help the local leadership develop local capability to meet local needs. There is a widespread demand.

Products and Services

The products and processes, the core of MARS research output, include:

• assessment and evaluation instruments;
• curriculum support materials;
• professional development support through live workshops and materials which support them effectively through a 'cascade':
• analytical instruments to support the above.

Clients fund only the cost of delivering these services; the development work underpinning them receives support from the National Science Foundation and other sources.

Tasks

Tasks are at the heart of standards-based reform. A much broader range of tasks is needed for performance assessment - mainly rich, substantial tasks close to those which students need to be able to tackle, if they are to be effective in their everyday life and work. We give some examples of such tasks, of student work on them, and of how it is assessed.

Papers & Conferences

Here you will find on-line versions and support material for recent papers and conference presentations by MARS colleagues.

Evaluation Evidence

This independent external evaluation evidence that MARS products are indeed "new or substantially improved" is grouped under four headings:

• peer review evidence from MARS major funding agencies;
• views of MARS client-collaborators;
• double-blind impact studies;
• some results from MARS own data analysis.

Two of these sections are controlled by the independent evaluation consultants Inverness Research Associates.

Methodology

This section describes in more detail the research approach that MARS uses in its work, building on the outline Tools for System Improvement.

MARS Team

The people in MARS bring together two decades of skill and experience, national and international, in the design and implementation of performance assessment. We tell you something about some of them, including the leadership of MARS. MARS is built on earlier work by many others, nationally and internationally, particularly the Balanced Assessment Project (BA) from which MARS grew.

Contacts

Contact information and websites for the organizations behind MARS and for many of the people we work with.