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Balanced Assessment
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Please Note: Balanced Assessment printed materials are available from this site, except for those indicated below. Please use the order form and follow the ordering directions carefully as they have changed. Current prices can be found on our order form.

Please also note that the Balanced Assessment Primary & Elementary Tasks have been published by Corwin Press. The Balanced Assessment Transition & Middle School Tasks have been published by Teachers' College Press. These tasks may still be viewed in .pdf format on this website but they may not be copied or printed.

Balanced Assessment in Mathematics

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About the program

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From 1993 to 2003, the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics Program existed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The project group developed a large collection of innovative mathematics assessment tasks for grades K to 12, and trained teachers to use these assessments in their classrooms.
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The library of over 300 mathematics assessment tasks developed during the project remains freely available through this web site. Teachers may use these materials in their own classrooms at no cost.
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This site also offers reports on our approach to mathematics assessment and our distinctive objects x actions scoring system. A more detailed overview of the project is also available.
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One of the most satisfying results of this ten-year project was the enthusiastic response of teachers to our assessment tasks and publications. We hope that you will continue to find the Balanced Assessment tasks to be a valuable resource.
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Ordering Balanced Assessment publications

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It is possible to purchase printed Balanced Assessment publications using our order form.
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Our library of assessment tasks

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If you are looking for a specific task, you can find it by name or by number.
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If you're just getting to know our materials, we'd like to suggest a few of our favorite tasks: (space)
  Primary (K to 2):     Shirts in the Mirror, Dot-to-Dot, TV Shows
  Elementary (3 to 5):     Fermi Four, Gardens of Delight, Broken Calculators
  Transition (5 to 7):     Hockey Pucks, Bricks for Books, Crazy Clocks
  Middle School (6 to 8):     Walkway, Confetti Crush, Fractured Subtraction
  High School, Basic & Exemplar:     Ford and Ferrari, Oops! Glass Top, Postcards from the Falls
  High School:     Ostrich and Seahorse, Bumpy-Ness, Fermi Estimates II
  High School, Advanced:     Para-Ball-A, Red Dots, Blue Dots, Dart Boards
  Technology-based (7 to 12):     Full of Beans, Twinkle, Twinkle, Detective Stories
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Our approach to assessment and scoring

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These reports and materials were developed while the Balanced Assessment program operated at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, between 1993 and 2003.
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Assessing Mathematical Understanding and Skills Effectively (AMUSE)
Also available as a Word document.
This 1995 report describes our project group's approach to mathematics assessment.
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Mathematics Content and Process Scoring System (MCAPS)
Also available as a Word document.
This report describes our objects x actions approach to scoring assessment tasks.
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MCAPS Scoring Tool
Requires Microsoft Excel or compatible spreadsheet.
This spreadsheet implementation of the MCAPS scoring system enables teachers to efficiently use the system in their classes.
Project Group
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Judah L. Schwartz,
  Principal Investigator/Director
Joan Kenney,
  Project Coordinator/Director
Susan Ilias
Kevin Kelly
Teresa Sienkiewicz
Yesha Sivan
Victor Steinbok
Amy Warren
Michal Yerushalmy

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Contact information
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For information on using BA tasks in the classroom, professional development for teachers and administrators, and issues regarding orders, please contact:
   Joan Kenney
   Joan_Kenney@post.harvard.edu
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For technical web site issues, contact:
   dan@mathshell.org

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Credits and copyright
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The materials on this web site were developed under National Science Foundation grants MDR-9252902 and ESI-9726403 (subcontracts from the University of California at Berkeley and Michigan State University), with additional funding from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Boston Public Schools, the Cambridge Public Schools, and the Noyce Foundation..
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All documents are Copyright © 1995-2003, President and Fellows of Harvard College. With the exceptions listed above in the heading to this page you are hereby granted the right to duplicate or print these materials for use in your classroom or school. Otherwise, these materials are protected by copyright.


This web site was originally designed by Kevin Kelly.

Last Update: 10/17/2015

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