Deborah Loewenberg Ball conducted the following interview with Brandon Peoples, a sixth grader, on March 8, 2004 at the first MSRI Workshop on Critical Issues in Mathematics Education.

This interview assessment of a student's mathematical understanding, conducted live in front of the assembled workshop participants, provides an immediate and vivid case of student thinking and exemplifies the interview assessment, an important mechanism for accessing student thinking.

1. 1 Ball: [To audience] Brandon and I are going to pretend you're not in the room, so I'm going to stop talking to you and we don't actually care that you're there, so, uh, goodbye. And uh, just be as quiet as you can because we actually want to do the work that we're setting out to do here. So, okay?

2. [To Brandon] So, you know some of the stuff we were doing, before people came, we might go back to some of that just because some of it was interesting and we didn't really finish talking about it. But I wanted to just start by, talking to you just a little bit about school. Do you remember when I called you the other day? We had a few minutes and I asked you a few things about your school and what you're working on this year? So can we just go back to that, because we were – we didn't have very much time that day.

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