A year-long collaboration is helping high school teachers design assessments that offer a richer view of students’ mathematical reasoning and problem-solving.
This fall, TEAM began a year-long assessment initiative with approximately 30 teachers from a medium-sized school district serving several high schools. The work starts from a simple but consequential idea: teachers can learn only what their assessments allow them to see. If instruction asks students to reason, make connections, and solve unfamiliar problems, assessments need to make those abilities visible too.
At the opening session, teachers worked with a field-tested collection of open-ended problems spanning grades 9–12. They solved the problems themselves, considered the standards and mathematical ideas most important in their courses, and then selected, revised, or augmented questions for their students. Unlike questions that call for a single answer or procedure, these problems may invite several approaches, ask students to explain their reasoning, or challenge them to adapt what they know when the conditions of a problem change.
The teachers will continue refining the problems and developing rubrics that describe both what students should know and what evidence of that knowledge should appear in their work. Each course-level group, such as geometry, will create its own assessment and rubric. Some problems will deliberately appear on more than one course assessment, giving teachers and the district a way to examine how student thinking develops across courses and grade levels. After the assessments are administered in spring 2027, teachers will work in grade-level teams to score students’ responses and reflect on what the process helped them notice.
“We can learn about students’ understanding and growth only to the extent that our assessments allow,” said co-director Dr. Leslie Dietiker. “When we teach ambitiously, we need assessments that reveal how students are developing as reasoners and problem solvers. This project also gives teachers an opportunity to negotiate shared goals and identify ways to strengthen their instruction.”
Dr. Dietiker and Dr. Lara Jasien, co-directors of the TEAM Center, lead the initiative. The research team also includes Dr. Judy Kysh, Dr. Merve Kursav, and Dr. Michael Lolkus from CPM Educational Program, and Anna Dailey, a PhD student at BU Wheelock. Dr. Kysh was the principal designer of the institute, drawing heavily on her assessment work with the California Math Project, and Dr. Lolkus helped revise and expand the problem collection. Over the coming year, the TEAM researchers will study the choices teachers make, the priorities expressed in their rubrics, the assessment results, and teachers’ reflections on the experience. That analysis will help the group understand the approach’s benefits and limitations and improve it for future partners, with the possibility of offering an assessment institute for middle and high schools and districts in the Northeast in summer 2027.