SAUM Section Forums

SAUM Forum Hand-Out
SAUM: Supporting Assessment in Undergraduate Mathematics

Assessment of student learning addresses three questions:

  • What should our students learn?
  • How well are they learning?
  • What should we change so that future students will learn more and understand it better?
Principles of Assessment:
  • Assessment is a not a single event but a continuous cycle.
  • Assessment must be an open process.
  • Assessment must promote valid inferences.
  • Assessment that matters should always employ multiple measures of performance.
  • Assessment should measure what is worth learning, not just what is easy to measure.
  • Assessment should support every student's opportunity to learn important mathematics.
The assessment cycle:
  • Articulate the learning goals of the curricular block and a set of objectives that should lead to the accomplishment of those goals.
  • Design strategies (e.g. curriculum and instructional methods) that will accomplish the objectives, taking into account student learning experiences and diverse learning styles, as well as research on how students learn.
  • Determine the areas of student activities and accomplishments in which quality will be judged. Select assessment methods designed to measure student progress toward completion of goals and objectives.
  • Gather assessment data; summarize and interpret the results.
  • Use the results of the assessment to improve the curricular block --- the payoff.
  • Return to top.

Some references on assessment:
  • Gold, B., Marion, W. A., and Keith, S. Z., eds., Assessment Practices in Undergraduate Mathematics, MAA Notes # 49, 1999
  • Palomba, C. A., and Banta, T. W., Assessment Essentials, Jossey-Bass, 1999
  • Walvoord, B. E.,and Anderson, V. J., Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment, Jossey-Bass, 1998.
  • Banta, T. W. (Editor), Building a Scholarship of Assessment, Jossey-Bass, 2002. (P. Ewell's Chapter on History of Assessment)
  • Angelo, T. A. and Cross, K. P., Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd ed. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 1993.
  • Alverno College Faculty, Student Assessment-as-Learning at Alverno College, 3rd. ed., Alverno College, Milwaukee, WI 1994
  • See the bibliography list in APUM -- #1 above.
Assessment workshops
 There will be a second version of the SAUM assessment workshop which started in San Diego; it has been tentatively scheduled to begin the two days before MathFest (July 30-31, 2002) and to finish with two days at Baltimore (January 2003). This workshop is to help departments which want to work seriously on an aspect of their assessment program. It requires at least two faculty members from the department to attend the sessions, and work on their assessment program in-between the sessions.

If you're interested in contributing a case study to the volume SAUM:
The format will be:

  1. Short (* 50 words) abstracts
  2. Background and Purpose
  3. Developing the Original Assessment Plan
  4. Details of the Original Assessment Plan
  5. Findings
  6. Use of the Findings (including those that fed into subsequent assessment plans)
  7. Details of the Subsequent Plans (second, third, etc.)
  8. Success Factors For case studies that are in their first cycle, #5 would not have the parenthetical statement and #6 would not be applicable.

Web site for the SAUM project: http://www.maa.org/SAUM/index.html

If you're interested in attending a SAUM workshop or contributing to the volume being developed, contact bmadison@uark.edu