DEVELOPMENT ARTICLE Assessing and tracking students’ problem solving performances in anchored learning environments Brian A. Bottge Æ Enrique Rueda Æ Jung Min Kwon Æ Timothy Grant Æ Perry LaRoque Ó Association for Educational Communications and Technology 2007 Abstract The purpose of this randomized experiment was to compare the performance of high-, average-, and low-achieving middle school students who were assessed with parallel versions of a computer-based test (CBT) or a paper-pencil test (PPT). Tests delivered in interactive, immersive environments like the CBT may have the advantage of providing teachers with diagnostic tools that can lead to instruction tailored to the needs of students at different achievement levels. To test the feasibility of CBT, students were randomly assigned to the CBT or PPT test conditions to measure what they had learned from an instructional method called enhanced anchored math instruction. Both assessment methods showed that students benefited from instruction and differentiated students by achievement status. The navigation maps generated from the CBT revealed that the low-achieving students were able to navigate the test, spent about the same amount of time solving the subproblems as the more advanced students, and made use of the learning scaffolds. Keywords Classroom learning Á Mathematics Á Interactive learning environments Á Low achievers Á Assessment Introduction Government reports such as What Work Requires of Schools: A SCANS Report for America 2000 (U.S. Department of Labor 1991) and more recent publications (e.g., Gray and Herr 1998; National Center on Education and the Economy 2007; Thornburg 2002; Uchida et al. 1996) stress the importance of workers having a sound foundation in basic skills and B. A. Bottge (&) Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation Counseling, University of Kentucky, 222 Taylor Education Building, Lexington, KY 40506, USA e-mail: brian.bottge@uky.edu E. Rueda Á J. M. Kwon Á T. Grant Á P. LaRoque Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 1025 W. Johnson St., Madison, WI 53706, USA 123 Education Tech Research Dev DOI 10.1007/s11423-007-9069-y