The Challenge: Aligning math standards to a pathway industry sector AND a multidisciplinary project can be a challenge. It is often difficult to connect grade level math content to a project authentically. Depending on the industry sector and project topic, math may not play a central role in the project.
Our Approach: Performance assessments are crucial to making math learning relevant and engaging for students through application of math standards and practices in real-life scenarios. The math connection in a multidisciplinary project might look different from other subjects; often existing as a curriculum-embedded task that is connected to the grade level project and/or industry sector, the math component might not necessarily feed into the final project products although students are still expected to produce portfolio-quality products.
Expectations: Since learning and teaching needs to be personalized to make math content relevant in the Linked Learning context, the math teacher's role becomes even more important. The article Putting Assessment Back in the Hands of Teachers makes the case that "teacher-created performance assessments can lead to deeper learning and powerful changes in instructional climate."
But what about SBAC? The math tasks in SBAC are an on-demand, stand alone type of performance assessment. In Linked Learning, we take the SBAC tasks one step further to be a curriculum-embedded task, assessing multiple performance outcomes, allowing for multiple student responses, and often lasting several days to a couple weeks to complete. Within a curriculum-embedded performance assessment, students may have multiple opportunities to practice and demonstrate knowledge on individual performance tasks similar to those in SBAC. Click on this link to see a comparison of the different types of performance assessments.
Our Approach: Performance assessments are crucial to making math learning relevant and engaging for students through application of math standards and practices in real-life scenarios. The math connection in a multidisciplinary project might look different from other subjects; often existing as a curriculum-embedded task that is connected to the grade level project and/or industry sector, the math component might not necessarily feed into the final project products although students are still expected to produce portfolio-quality products.
Expectations: Since learning and teaching needs to be personalized to make math content relevant in the Linked Learning context, the math teacher's role becomes even more important. The article Putting Assessment Back in the Hands of Teachers makes the case that "teacher-created performance assessments can lead to deeper learning and powerful changes in instructional climate."
But what about SBAC? The math tasks in SBAC are an on-demand, stand alone type of performance assessment. In Linked Learning, we take the SBAC tasks one step further to be a curriculum-embedded task, assessing multiple performance outcomes, allowing for multiple student responses, and often lasting several days to a couple weeks to complete. Within a curriculum-embedded performance assessment, students may have multiple opportunities to practice and demonstrate knowledge on individual performance tasks similar to those in SBAC. Click on this link to see a comparison of the different types of performance assessments.
