New Jersey’s high school (eleventh-grade)
mathematics test assesses knowledge and skills in four content areas
or "clusters":
Cluster 1:
Number Sense, Concepts, and Applications
Cluster 2:
Spatial Sense and Geometry
Cluster 3:
Data Analysis, Probability, Statistics, and Discrete Mathematics
Cluster 4:
Patterns, Functions, and Algebra
These clusters contain some degree of overlapping
content, since mathematical topics are not disconnected but are
part of an interconnected whole. The New Jersey mathematics
assessment committee assigned percentages to indicate how point
values on any individual test should be distributed among the four
clusters. The committee's current recommendations are:
The multiple-choice (MC) items on these tests
assess higher-level cognitive processes than the items in traditional
multiple-choice tests. It is anticipated that students will take
an average of between one and two minutes to answer each MC question.
The answers are computer scored and have a weight of one point each.
There are abilities that are difficult to assess
with multiple-choice questions. These include the ability to: communicate
mathematical concepts and arguments; see and make connections among
strands of mathematics; make assumptions; organize and describe
data graphically; and make estimates and predictions based on incomplete
data or patterns of events. Also, the multiple-choice format does
not easily accommodate multiple responses and partial credit for
responses. For these reasons, the New Jersey Proficiency Assessment
in Mathematics includes constructed response items in addition to
the multiple-choice or selected-response items.
Open-ended (OE) items require students to construct
their own written or graphical responses and explain their responses.
It is anticipated that students will take approximately ten minutes
to answer each OE question. Their responses are hand-scored holistically
on a scale from 0 to 3.
The holistic scoring guide (general rubric)
was created to help readers score OE items consistently within a
single test and across different forms of that test which may be
administered either in a single year or over a span of years.
The eleventh-grade mathematics assessment committee considered the
relative strengths of the three item types in measuring the various
aspects of what students know and are able to do in mathematics.
The following table is based on the committees’ recommendations.
