Assessing Students9 Mathematical Communication

Assessment of students ’ mathematical communication through the use ofopen-ended tasks and scoring procedures is addressed, as is the use ofopen-ended tasks to assess students9 mathematical communica-tion by providing students opportunities to display their mathematical thinking andreasoning. Also, two scoring procedures (quantitative holistic scoring procedure andqualitative analytic scoring procedure) are describedfor examining students9 communication skills. Conceivably every mathematics teacher, from kinder-garten to graduate school, has had the experience of asking a student to justify an answer and has had that student immediately assume that the answer must be wrong. The student reacts in a way that indicates a beliefthat the teacher is asking for ajustification ofan error, the student appears to be formulatingsomequick maneuver to "correct the mistake. " Perhaps this hap-pens because it is so rare for students to provide explanations in mathematics class, so strange to tal