Graphics calculators and assessment.

Introduction

The educational significance of graphics calculators is closely related to the likelihood that they will be accessible to students in many situations: in classrooms, studying at home and, critically for this paper, in assessment situations. The size, ready portability and rapidly affordable cost of graphics calculators together make it necessary to reconsider assessment of students' mathematical capabilities under the assumption that they will be permitted to make use of a graphics calculator. This paper provides an overview and analysis of the relationships between graphics calculators and assessment, and identifies a number of important issues.

Over recent years, we have worked as a team to gradually incorporate graphics calculators into an undergraduate mathematics course at Murdoch University in Western Australia. (Bradley, Kemp & Kissane 1994). Our principal motivation for including graphics calculators into the fabric of the course was (and still is) the improvement of both teaching and learning mathematics. However, as others in similar circumstances have found, issues of assessment arose naturally and needed attention. Although some of the issues are amenable to analysis, most of them have required practical work in teaching and curriculum development. The course concerned mainly comprises work in pre-calculus, algebra and trigonometry, although it also includes some work with the idea of a derivative function. However, our curriculum development work in this course has allowed us to see the wider implications of graphics calculators for assessment in other educational contexts. Our work has been supported in part by a national grant from CAUT, the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching, an initiative of the Australian Government to support innovative work of this kind.

There seems to have been surprisingly little written about assessment issues related to graphics calculators yet (For example, none of the papers in Andrews & Kissane (1994) dealt with the matter). It is also interesting to note that, despite the apparent availability of microcomputers for mathematics education for a considerable time now, issues of assessment seem not to have been carefully analyzed in the literature and have not been prominent in thinking about the relationships between technology and mathematics education. The explanation for these phenomena is that it has not been necessary to grapple with the issues, since in most practical situations, students have not had enough access to the technology to demand that we contemplate its use in assessment. The development of the personal technology of graphics calculators has changed this, and thus provides the imperative for this paper.

Kissane - 2 OCT 1996



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Gómez, P. & Waits, B. (Eds.) (1996). Roles of calculators in the classroom.

Mail comments to Pedro Gómez: pgomez@uniandes.edu.co