| Providing high quality education for student learning is dependent upon the professional learning quality afforded to teachers. Teacher learning must remain of paramount importance in education because as "staff members learn and improve their instructional practice, students benefit and show increases in learning (Richardson, 1997, 1998)" (York-Barr, 2001). When professional learning designs a strong relationship between teaching practice and student learning, then teachers bridge curriculum initiatives and reform agenda efforts into the realities of their classrooms through the interactions of their learning experiences and student engagement.; Professional learning runs the risk of falling victim to traditional methods that are disconnected, fragmented, and incoherent (Fullan, 1991). The particular interest of this study is the disconnected professional practices that are foreign to teaching practice. Examining the process of teacher learning will reveal the ways in which teachers are making connections between their learning and classroom practice.; To narrow the scope of this broad professional learning range, this study investigates two third grade teachers professional learning experience by using collaborative action research in the context of mathematics assessment to promote students' mathematics learning. For this qualitative study, I seek answers to the following questions: What happens when teachers participate in collaborative inquire to inform their assessment practices in mathematics? How do teachers construct mathematics assessments through collaborative inquiry? What are the influential factors that shape their decision making around mathematics assessment construction? What do we learn about this teacher learning process by examining teacher artifacts, interactions and reflections?; Methods of this study include analyzing the collected artifacts from the teachers' collaborative inquiry activities. Artifacts were analyzed by coding methods, themes and patterns, knowledge and performance frameworks (NCTM, 2000), the district's mathematics curriculum and Bloom's Taxonomy (OfficePort, 2005). The research findings show that teachers based their mathematics assessment task decisions on internal and external driving forces, they framed their method of assessment construction around design, frequency, and goals and they shifted their assessment practice, which transformed their teaching roles. |
