Assessment Tools
To determine student gains, a test instrument was developed to measure students’
acquisition and retention on the final skill of a five-step instructional set: solving linear
functions with unknowns on both sides of the equal sign. After creating an initial
pool of 70 items and elimination of seven items by an expert review of experienced
high school math department chairs, a 63-item pool of questions on solving
linear functions with unknowns on both sides of the equal sign were distributed to
32 tenth-grade students who had completed prealgebra and algebra with an A or B
grade. The 27 items that remained carried a medium difficulty level between 37.5%
and 62.5% accuracy. Thus, a score of 13 to 14 correct would mean that the student
was performing on par for solving algebraic linear functions with tenth-grade students
who had completed a full year of prealgebra and a full year of algebra with an
A or B in the same school region.
A single test form was used for pretest, posttest, and follow-up. Pretest measures
were obtained one week prior to implementation of the treatment. Posttest measures
were obtained five weeks later upon completion of the last day of the treatment, and
follow-up measures were obtained three weeks after treatment had ended. The tests
did not have a time limit per se, except that the test had to be completed by the end
of the class (50 minutes).No student used the entire class period on any of the measures.
Students were not instructed on any of the equations between the posttest and
the follow-up. Test items were scored as correct or incorrect by teacher comparison
to an answer key. All test scores were checked by the author.