Developing Items to Assess Middle Grades Teachers - 1 - DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT PERMISSION Identifying Attributes and Developing Items to Assess Middle Grades Teachers’ Multiplicative Reasoning

A growing number of projects, many funded by the National Science Foundation, have begun to combine research in mathematics education with psychometric models. Promises of such research include: (a) new insight about the distribution of mathematical knowledge in large populations, (b) empirical links between teachers’ mathematical knowledge and students’ achievement, (c) the development of measures that capture diagnostic information useful to school teachers or professional developers, and (d) demonstrations that more recently developed psychometric models can be harnessed to address challenges of assessing students’ and teachers’ knowledge of mathematics. Furthermore, the range of current and emerging psychometric models provides many possibilities for work and the intersection of mathematics education and psychometrics.