Copyright © 1994 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Measuring Up provides examples of problems that students should be able to solve at a fourth grade level as well as insights on how to evaluate their responses. For example, one prototypical problem has students estimate the total number of clothes butto ns being worn by people in their school that day. Students who provided "high" responses utilized relatively complex estimation procedures accounting for the size of students, number of students, and the number of classes in the school. "Low" responses, on the other hand, utilized only a portion of the available data and provided little logical justification for the final answer.
The electronic version of Measuring Up is a "sampler" of the book designed to provide a powerful overview of the book's key concepts in a short time. A "Fast Forward--Get the Idea" icon takes the reader quickly through the book's main points. In one of the assessment activities (the "Quilt Designer"), users of the electronic sampler can interact with the same software that students used in the actual activity.
The electronic version of Measuring Up is available by anonymous ftp from ftp.nas.edu in /reports/measuring_up and runs on any Macintosh computer with Hypercard 2.0 or higher.
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