Dear Colleague:

MARS offers Balanced Assessment in Mathematics, a Workshop Series for teacher leaders and others who support the professional development of mathematics teachers in grades 3-9 in your district, state, or project. The Series provides your Leadership Team with a set of well-developed materials and experiences using the materials in MARS-led and MARS-supported sessions so that you feel confident to use these resources to support professional development of teachers in your local setting.

Please join us June 17-20, 2003 in Novi, Michigan.

Below is a brief description of some of the workshop sessions. For each session, we provide field-tested Leader Guides.

Understanding Student Understanding

This type of session is designed to give teachers experiences to deepen and broaden their perspectives on assessment of student understanding. The activities develop their capacities to:

• come to grips with the core elements of performance in a high-quality assessment task;
  
• appreciate a variety of ways in which one can reason about and approach a task;
  
• examine closely students’ written work on the task – what does a student understand, what is the student struggling with and what is the evidence; what logic might lead to an incorrect response;
  
• consider what further insights emerge from examining additional documentation (e.g., video clips) of students’ engagement with a task;
  
• consider what the teacher of these students might do next in instruction.

The materials for this type of session include a Protocol and task-specific Leader Guides. The Protocol describes a general routine that is useful with any task from the BA-MARS collection. It includes black line masters of questions that frame the activities. The Leader Guides provide additional support in facilitating a session around a specific task. Each Leader Guide includes the assessment task and student work on the task. The samples of student work have been carefully selected for the issues they raise about curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment. Each Leader Guide provides commentary based on the experiences of leaders who have used the Guide.

Using Assessment to Support Learning

Two Leader Guides provide examples of using high-quality assessment tasks for assessment and for instruction. One uses a video case of an elementary teacher using a task for informal assessment. The other Guide details the use of peer feedback to revise and improve students’ responses to performance tasks. Additional cases with video are contained in Using Assessment to Reshape Mathematics Teaching, which participants receive.

Scoring What We Value

It is in scoring that we make explicit what we value in mathematical performance. Several Leader Guides are designed to give teachers opportunities to reflect on the way they currently assess students, to apply various scoring schemes to student work, and consider the different purposes each rubric may serve. The scoring schemes include holistic, holistic-by-category, and point rubrics. One Guide has each teacher develop a generic rubric that is intended to provide general and useful guidance to her/his students about writing thoughtful, strong, complete, and clear responses that provide evidence of what they know and what they can do.

Please contact the Michigan State University MARS office at (517) 432-0815 for further information. We look forward to working with your leadership team. Each participant should bring a copy of her/his local mathematics standards or frameworks to this session.

Sandra K. Wilcox
MARS Project Director

What others have said about Balanced Assessment in Mathematics:

“As is your custom—the highest quality, the best of efforts, and the passion for your work continue to be evidenced in your keen preparation, presentations, and considerations for your audience.”

“An outstanding workshop – setting, people, and most importantly the material covered. I learned so much about assessment and will take this knowledge home to use in my classroom and share with the teachers in my district. Thank you for all the beautiful overheads.”

“Exceptional materials. I appreciate the comprehensive compilation of materials in the notebook. This will be a valuable part of my professional toolkit. This was one of the finest professional development sessions I’ve ever attended.”

A block of rooms has been reserved at the Novi Hotel Baronette, 27790 Novi Road, Novi, Michigan 48377, at the special rate of $119 per night single/$129 double occupancy. Telephone the hotel directly at 800 395-9009 or 248 349-7800 to make a reservation. Directions from the hotel to the Tollgate Education Center will be provided—Tollgate is less than 2 miles from the hotel. For your convenience, we recommend your team rent a car or van for use during the week of the workshop.

The Hotel Baronette is 30 minutes from Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Take West I-94 about 5 miles to North I-275. Travel about 25 miles to West I-96 (exit from the two left lanes onto I-96). Exit right at Novi Road, (Exit #162, the first exit off I-96). Turn right into the Twelve Oaks Mall entrance at the north end of the mall complex, then left to hotel.