Student Assessments
Throughout the school year, participating students completed pre- and post-assessments for the following five areas covered by our curriculum/materials:
- Linear Equations
- Functions & Graphing Linear Equations
- Solving Systems of Linear Equations
- Polynomials & Factoring
- Solving Quadratic Equations
All of these assessments included a mixture of questions designed to measure students’ conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and procedural flexibility. Students completed the pretest for a particular topic before their teacher began teaching the unit, and the posttest was completed at the end of the unit. In addition, students completed an Overall assessment at the beginning and end of the school year which included a blend of questions from all five of the topics listed above.
The Harvard team distributed assessment materials to participating teachers, and then teachers administered the assessments during their regular class time. Students completed all assessments on paper.
Once the completed paper data were collected by the Harvard team, they were mailed to Vanderbilt for processing and data entry. The Vanderbilt team double-entered all student assessment data into a custom-designed database built using FileMaker software. The FileMaker database included regular and double-entry layouts which had built-in checks to alert our data enterers when the original and double-entry responses did not match.
Alpha reliability for our measures is reported below.
Alpha Reliability for Year 3 Student Assessment Data
Alpha Reliability by Subscale (Year 3 Overall Assessment)
*Click on the links below to view our Overall and topic specific assessments.