| This study investigated the impact of a mandated contextualized assessment system on high school math teachers' classroom practice in one large high school in Wyoming immediately after implementation of the system. In 2000, the Wyoming legislature established graduation requirements for students that included mastery of the common core of knowledge and common core of skills. The State Board of Education and the Wyoming Department of Education decided to require that districts collect a convincing array of evidence that could be used to determine whether or not a student had met the graduation requirements. School districts were to create an assessment system, called the Body of Evidence, which would yield the most valid inferences possible about a student's performance on Wyoming Content and Performance Standards. The school district in which the case study was conducted adopted contextualized assessments written by teachers in Wyoming as part of the Wyoming Activities Assessment Consortium. Math teachers in the district chose assessment activities from these samples that could be naturally embedded into instruction. These activities were common in all identified Body of Evidence courses, such as pre-algebra, algebra I, and geometry.; Nine members of a high school mathematics department agreed to participate in interviews, a task analysis activity, a questionnaire, and a survey. In addition, four teachers were observed for an entire course of study, and records were kept of the purposes of their lessons, their classroom interaction, the procedural complexity of the math content, the problem presentation (e.g., context and processes used), and the cognitive complexity of questions asked of students.; Data showed that there was a reported change in teachers' practices at the end of the study, but few changed their beliefs as a result of using the common assessments for the Body of Evidence. Questioning by the teachers remained at the lower level throughout the course. However, the use of tasks with moderate- to high-level procedural complexity increased over time with a subsequent decrease in use of low-level tasks. |
