Blog #10: NAEP Student Analysis

Blog # 10: NAEP Student Work Reflection

                One thing that was evident after every group had completed their presentations is that there are multiple ways to assess student work using the provided rubrics. In many circumstances, group members disagreed on how to assess a student and there was almost always disagreement among the members of the entire class. The NAEP problem that seemed to be the easiest out of the four to assess was the Graphs of Pockets problem. In this problem, the reviewer did not have to analyze student work but only their written explanation of how the student arrived at the answer. Often the work shown and the written explanation of the problem belonged in separate categories on the rubric for the other problems and it was difficult to determine where the student fell. The rubric for the Graphs of Pockets problem is clearly written and much more simplistic than the other three rubrics and therefore the easiest to assess.

                The problem with the second lowest difficulty to assess was the Marcy’s Dots problem. In this problem, the reviewer is looking for whether or not the student found the pattern and accurately calculated each step using that pattern to arrive at the correct answer. The student either wrote out the details of the pattern or showed the pattern through their work. The rubric, however, was slightly vague in its explanation of each category. For example, the explanation under the partial category simply states, “a partial correct explanation”. This statement can be interpreted a million different ways which might be helpful to the reviewer if a particular problem does not meet the criteria of the other categories or it might be difficult for the reviewer to determine exactly what that means.

                The third problem in terms of difficulty in assessment was my group’s problem called Number Tiles. We struggled when trying to assess this problem because the rubric was very complex, having several different components for each category. This included separate identifiers about the rubric listed with letters. This often caused confusion when trying to assess a problem due to multiple answers being included in a single category.

                Finally, I felt the Radio Stations category was the hardest of the four problems to assess because a diagram was involved in the answer. A visual that makes sense to one person might not necessarily make sense to another person. Additionally, this problem seemed to be the hardest problem out of the four to solve for it required multiple steps and higher order thinking. The rubric for this problem includes an example diagram and is very detailed for what aspects of the diagram needed to be labeled for each category.