Category: Early Math

RME researchers reconvened with Dallas-Fort Worth area teachers to co-design a guide that teachers will use to select from a portfolio of formative assessments for their kindergarten through second grade students. These teachers shared important practitioner insights for the MMaRS research project, from which researchers will create formative assessments of numeric relational reasoning and spatial reasoning. The Teacher Advisory Panel, also knowns as TAP, provides ongoing support to the RME research team to ensure the results of the assessments the researchers are building and their accompanying resources will be useful to guide teacher’s instructional decision making and support student learning of these constructs. 

During the session, teachers participated in a desirability test activity in which they chose words from a bank to describe their immediate reactions to each page of a five-step process outlined in a prototype of the learning progression and assessment selection guide. (Learning progressions will form the basis of the formative assessments.)

Next, teachers collaborated with the research team on a virtual co-design exercise, where two small groups of teachers iterated to re-design the prototype guide based on their classroom experiences. The picture above shows reactions from teachers based on the visual appeal of one of the pages. The picture below shows how teachers provided feedback on how to reorganize the document. The RME research team will use the information from the TAP work session—as well as multiple other sources of data—to build the teacher resources and formative assessment items for the MMaRS project.