<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 1:48 AM, <<a href="mailto:forster@ozonline.com.au">forster@ozonline.com.au</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> The strongest argument against is that any easily administered testing is biased towards lower level skills (as defined in Bloom's taxonomy). That would be OK, depending on how the data is used. Any attempt to modify teaching in response, biases the teaching towards the lower level skills. In the Australian case, schools will be forced to confine their teaching to lower order skills to maintain their ranking, preserve enrolments and avoid criticism and funding cuts. In the case of RTI, it risks defining student progress by a narrow subset of education skills and overly concentrating teaching on this narrow subset. Tony </blockquote><div> Tony, This is my perennial response to the existing programs of this sort. When I plan interventions, I start with meaning and significance of math in the life of the person, their family and their social networks. Then some major concepts areas that can support and advance these meanings become apparent. From there, skills and tasks within concept areas can be mapped and developed. What is highly problematic is that all the existing mainstream heavy testing machinery is at the level of skills. And what I am doing on the individual basis is not currently scalable. I can't even explain many parts of this highly intuitive, expertise-based process. To address this problem, I just started to work on a crowdsourced rubric that will probe personal meaning and significance of math, and later used during interventions to help people track growth of math's significance in their lives. I am now polling local parents who work with me, with some very fruitful initial brainstorming happening among them. I am also meeting with several people who have large QA sites or projects that can be used to aggregate "sparse" info for crowdsourced projects. This may not happen fast, because of my other tasks such as the math game design project, but we will see what happens. I want this tool to measure the impact of my projects, which we currently observe in a purely qualitative, case-study manner. Cheers, Maria Droujkova <a href="http://www.naturalmath.com">http://www.naturalmath.com</a> Make math your own, to make your own math. </div></div>