Projects

The Teacher Analysis of Student Knowledge (TASK) (link to interactive report) is an authentic, contextualized measure of teachers’ ability to analyze students’ mathematical thinking within a grade-specific content area in relation to research-based learning trajectories and formulate effective instructional responses. Successful implementation of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM), which were built upon existing research on student learning, depends on teachers' ability to translate this information to instructional practice. The TASK instrument, therefore, has the potential to measure teacher instructional capacity in relation to the CCSSM.

TASK is a 25-minute, online assessment that asks teachers of mathematics to examine a set of carefully designed student responses to an assessment prompt, to explain what the responses show about student understanding, to order the student responses according to their developmental sophistication (i.e., the learning trajectories), and to suggest informed instructional responses. TASKs have been developed for grades K-2 (Addition and Subtraction), 3-5 (Multiplication and Fractions), 6-8 (Proportional Reasoning) and 9-10 (Algebraic Reasoning).

The TASK instruments went through two years of iterative development and field trials. Initial development and piloting of the TASK instrument was supported by funding from the GE Foundation, as part of CPRE's evaluation of the GE Foundation’s Developing Futures™ in Education program. In 2012, TASK was administrated to a random sample of approximately 1,800 mathematics teachers in 250 schools across five states. These data were used to conduct studies of inter-rater reliability and internal consistency and correlate the TASK to a well-known measure of mathematical knowledge for teaching. The results of this large-scale field trial were also used to further refine the instrument, scoring rubric, and scoring procedures.

Since then, TASK has been used to evaluate teacher knowledge in several studies of the Ongoing Assessment Project and SunBay Math.