Assessment FAQs

Can I use only Math Boxes to collect assessment information? They seem to have all the skills in them.

Everyday Mathematics includes a variety of assessment tasks to ensure that all students have sufficient opportunities to demonstrate what they know. Some students best demonstrate their knowledge through pencil-and-paper tasks, some through performance tasks, and some through explanations and demonstrations. The assessment tasks identified in the program provide a variety of ways for students to demonstrate what they know. Using only one tool might limit what you are able to learn about your students.

I understand that Everyday Mathematics provides a Recognizing Student Achievement task for every lesson. May I choose my own instead of or in addition to the ones designated by the curriculum? If I don’t think the results of a particular Recognizing Student Achievement task accurately reflects what a student knows, what should I do?

The Recognizing Student Achievement tasks and Progress Check questions occur at carefully chosen points, based on the opportunities for distributed practice that occur throughout the program.

Assessment tasks were designed to vary the ways in which students are assessed for each Grade-Level Goal. The Everyday Mathematics authors respect teachers as professionals and expect that teachers will use their professional judgment when assessing students. If a particular Recognizing Student Achievement task does not adequately assess student achievement, the teacher may choose to disregard it. The Everyday Mathematics authors also anticipate that students’ performances on tasks that are not identified in Recognizing Student Achievement notes will often provide useful information regarding their progress toward a particular Grade-Level Goal. Teachers should feel free to link such tasks to appropriate Grade-Level Goals and include them in their assessment stories.

What are some suggestions for using the Progress Check and Open-Response Tasks?

The Progress Check includes a number of different components including a self-assessment, oral and slate assessments, a two-part written assessment, and an Open Response task. These components can be split up—that is, they do not all have to occur on the same day. In fact, the authors would recommend doing the Open Response task as a separate activity so that students are fresh when they attack these complex problems.

The written part of the assessment is divided up into Part A and Part B where Part A includes tasks on which students generally should be successful, and Part B includes tasks which are intended to provide formative information. It is possible that students will NOT be successful on many of the tasks in Part B of the written assessment. Teachers score the written assessments in a variety of ways. For example, while some teachers group items for the same Grade-Level Goal together and give them a composite score, other teachers score each item separately on the assessment separately—noting the relative difficulty and complexity of the related tasks. Still other teachers assign points to each item according to the level of difficulty—generally, the more difficult tasks are worth fewer points so that students are not heavily penalized for tasks when they were not expected to be universally successful on those tasks.