128 – Assessing Student Attitudes and Student Understanding
Assessing Quantitative Reasoning: EVALUATE What Students Know
Nandini Kannan
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Kimberly Massaro
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Ermine Orta
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Developing effective assessments of quantitative reasoning (QR) has posed a major challenge to the academic community. Even though there is a significant amount of literature on development of instruments for assessment of mathematical skills the research on assessing QR has been rather limited. One of the main challenges is that quantitative reasoning skills are, by definition, rooted in context. The University of Texas at San Antonio has developed a program to integrate quantitative reasoning skills across various disciplines in the general education curriculum. To assess and evaluate different levels of student learning, the taxonomy of Bloom and Webb was used to identify a list of action verbs associated with a basic, intermediate, and advanced level of cognition of QR. This process has allowed for student performance data to be collected and tracked longitudinally. In this article, an example of the student learning outcomes and course embedded assessment is presented for one of the general education courses participating in the program.
