Issues and Challenges of 21st Century Assessment in Mathematics Education (original) (raw)

In the 20th century, assessment in mathematics classrooms mainly focused on knowledge with low cognitive demands, in particular on testing students on memorized calculation procedures. In the 21 st century, we need to focus more on higher order thinking (HOT), which should also be reflected in mathematics assessment. This will require quite an overhaul, not only in assessment, but also of instruction as teachers will need to carefully look at how to best prepare students for assessment formats that activate HOT. In this chapter, we will explain that assessment tasks activating HOT focus on inquiry and creativity rather than on reproduction and imitation. To assist with analysing and redesigning tasks, we explain the usefulness of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy as a framework to conceptualize cognitive processes (e.g., summarizing, comparing, explaining, exploring, analysing, critiquing, and creating). We will validate the framework through four exemplary types of tasks: problem-posing tasks, puzzle-problems, modelling tasks based on realistic questions, and cloze paragraphs; and we will discuss how assessment tasks can be designed or redesigned based on the framework. We will review some challenges in the research and development of mathematics assessment for the 21 st century, present research-based evidence on how assessment tasks activating HOT in mathematics can be accessible tasks that lead to a better conceptual understanding of mathematics, and finally, we discuss issues of reliability and validity.