Research

My research interests have focused on the study of teachers’ classroom assessment practices, to better understand and model the relationship between teachers’ instructional goals, curricular decisions, and interpretation of student verbal and written work. I have focused on teachers’ instructionally embedded assessment practices: how teachers elicit, regard, and act upon students’ verbal and written responses during instruction. Unresolved questions that emerged during my experience as a mathematics teacher motivated this line of inquiry at a time when teaching and learning of mathematics was being redefined in terms of mathematical processes such as communication, problem solving and students’ representations.

I have complemented my research with extensive experience in curriculum and assessment development during my work at UC Santa Barbara in the “Preparing Latino Students for Algebra” project, as co-author of Balanced Unit Assessments for middle grades, as site coordinator for the “Classroom Assessment as a Basis for Teacher Change” project, and as co-PI of the “Revision of the Mathematics in Context Materials” project. Unique to the three latter projects was the theory-driven approach to material development I engaged in through ongoing collaboration with education researchers from the Freudenthal Institute, at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The theory of Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) and the approach to classroom-based developmental research espoused by Hans Freudenthal and other Dutch educators was used to inform the design and identification of problem contexts that offered greater “mathematical lift” and access to students’ mathematical representations.

Given the limited assessment materials available to support teachers’ formative assessment practices, I have found the simultaneous work in material development and research of teachers’ classroom practices to be mutually informative. Teacher use of curriculum and assessment materials often reveals fruitful learning lines (or developmental trajectories) essential for formative assessment. This research program is theory-driven and classroom-based. It can inform research in teaching and learning. And it can be applied in a manner relevant to the needs of teachers. My future research objectives involve further development of domain-specific design principles for formative assessment that can be used to advance teachers’ ability to elicit and make sense of students’ informal and pre-formal representations of mathematics, teacher knowledge of mathematics, and principled use of problem solving contexts. This line of research would be particularly relevant for addressing the instructional needs of students who typically struggle with formal, procedure-driven mathematics but who can often appropriate less formal procedures when they are anchored in meaningful contexts.

Recent Publications
Webb, D. C., Romberg, T. A., Burrill, J., & Ford, M. J. (2005). Teacher Collaboration: Focusing on Problems of Practice. In T. A. Romberg & T. P. Carpenter (Eds.), Understanding Math and Science Matters (pp. 231-251). Mahwah. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Webb, D. C. (2004). Enriching Assessment Opportunities Through Classroom Discourse. In T. A. Romberg (Ed.), Standards-Based Mathematics Assessment in Middle School: Rethinking Classroom Practice (pp. 169-187). New York: Teachers College Press.
Webb, D. C., Romberg, T. A., Dekker, T., de Lange, J., &Abels, M. (2004). Classroom Assessment as a Basis for Teacher Change. In T. A. Romberg (Ed.), Standards-Based Mathematics Assessment in Middle School: Rethinking Classroom Practice (pp. 223-235). New York: Teachers College Press.