ASPENS Grade 1 Classroom Set: Assessing Student Proficiency in Early Number Sense

Mathematical thinking is an essential 21st century skill. ASPENS ensures students get off to the right start by providing brief universal screening and progress monitoring assessments.

ASPENS measures are research-based, produce reliable, valid results and align with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (US) by assessing key mathematical processes and proficiencies. This data guides educators to: • Identify students who are at risk for mathematical difficulties • Provide targeted intervention support • Track progress and monitor growth for students who may be struggling • Evaluate the effectiveness of intervention

ASPENS is a series of three one-to-two minute timed predictive measures administered for the purposes of screening and progress monitoring student mathematical proficiency in kindergarten and first grade.

ASPENS measures assess students’ understanding of critical number concepts in kindergarten and first grade, as well as students’ abilities to use their understanding of these concepts in mathematical performance tasks.

Research strongly suggests that if students can make significant gains in mathematics in kindergarten and first grade, their long-term trajectory in mathematics is likely to be satisfactory. Therefore, there is a critical need to identify students who require early intervention in mathematics.

These predictive measures focus on two critical aspects of development of mathematics proficiency in order to create theoretically sound early screening and progress monitoring assessments: • Development of an increasingly refined sense of the relative magnitude of numbers (e.g., knowing that 18 is a little bit bigger than 16, but a lot bigger than 9) (Siegler & Booth, 2004) • Ability to count strategically and efficiently (e.g., knowing that 2 + 19 is the same as 19 + 2, so it is much quicker to start at 19 and count up to 21)

Assessments include: Magnitude Comparison; Missing Number; Basic Facts and Base 10 (for Grade 1 only).

The first grade ASPENS measure includes Magnitude Comparison, Missing Number subtests. Numbers for each subtest range from 0 to 99, and the score is the number of correct responses given in one minute.

• The Magnitude Comparison measure requires students to name the greater of two visually presented numbers.
• The Missing Number measure is comprised of pages with boxes containing strings of three numbers with the first, middle, or last number of the string missing, and students name the missing number.
• The Basic Arithmetic Facts and Base 10 measure is added in the middle of first grade to assess recall of basic arithmetic facts. Students are presented problems that contain elements that can be composed or decomposed in the Base 10 system (e.g., 5 + 9 becomes 4 + 10) to assess fact fluency. The score is the number of correct items (1 point for each problem) solved in two minutes.

Classroom Sets include everything needed for one person to conduct benchmark assessments for 25 students and progress monitoring for up to five students. The Administrator’s Handbook serves as a step-by-step guide to ASPENS. It provides specific administration, scoring, and interpretation guidance for each measure.