Assessing conceptual understanding in mathematics

Modern mathematics careers are now requiring conceptual skills such as, critical thinking, modeling, and application of the content. This change in skillset needed for careers has strongly impacted mathematics curriculum and assessment. Meaningful assessment involves examining students´ ability to inquire, to reason on targeted questions or tasks, and to promote conceptual understanding, not just focusing on discreet facts and principles. Mathematics assessment tools still focus solely on this procedural side of understanding mathematics instead of the equally important conceptual aspect of learning mathematics. Given that math is an active process that encourages higher-order thinking and problem solving, an assessment focusing on the growth of conceptual understanding is required. The proposed research focuses on the development of a tool that will be used to assess current U.S. calculus students´ ability to apply their conceptual understanding of a mathematic concept to scientific phenomena through modeling. The assessment using Netlogo would be very useful for math educators to have good tools to assess students´ conceptual understanding, as well as to develop instructional strategies used.