The Power of Big Ideas in Mathematics Education: Development and Pilot Testing of POWERSOURCE Assessments. CSE Report 697

The characteristics of expert knowledge--interconnectedness, understanding, and ability to transfer--are inextricably linked, a point that is critically important for educators and constitutes a major theme of this paper. This paper explores how an analysis of the architecture of expert knowledge can inform the development of assessments to help teachers move students toward greater expertise in mathematics, and it presents examples of such assessments. It also reviews student responses and preliminary results from pilot tests of assessments administered in sixth-grade classes in a large urban school district. Preliminary analyses suggest that an assessment strategy based on the structure of mathematical knowledge can reveal deficiencies in student understanding of and ability to apply fundamental concepts of pre-algebra, and has the potential to help teachers remediate those deficiencies. (Contains 7 figures and 10 tables.)