Assessing students’ understanding of operations involving integers should not just include assessing their skill in adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing integers. Equally important is their conceptual understanding of the process itself and thus need assessing as well. Even more important is to make the assessment process a context where students are given opportunity to connect previously learned concepts (this is the essence of assessment for learning). Because the study of integers is a pre-algebra topic, the tasks should also give opportunity to engage students in reasoning, number sense and algebraic thinking. The tasks below meet these criteria. These tasks can also be used to teach mathematics through problem solving.
The purpose of Task 1 is to encourage students to reason in more general way. That is why the cells are not visible. Of course students can solve this problem by making a table first but that is not the most ideal solution.
A standard way of assessing operations involving integers is to ask the students to perform the operation. Task 2 is different. it is more interested in engaging students in reasoning and in developing their number and operation sense.
Task 3 is an example of a task with many possible solutions. Asking students to find a relation between the values in Box A and Box B links operations with integers to the study of varying quantities or quantitative relationship which are fundamental concepts in algebra.
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