The goal of this exploratory study was to analyze how beginning prospective secondary school teachers approached the analysis of student written responses to formative assessment probes. We sought to identify what elements of students' written work were noticed, what types of inferences of student understanding were built, and what these noticed elements and inferences told us about levels of sophistication in assessing student understanding. Our results are based on the qualitative analysis of the written evaluations of student work made by 32 prospective secondary school teachers enrolled in an introductory teacher preparation course at our institution. The results of this study suggest that analyzing teachers' assessment of student understanding requires paying attention to both domain‐neutral and domain‐dependent aspects of teacher reasoning. Domain‐neutral dimensions help characterize how a teacher frames the assessment of student understanding. Domain‐dependent dimensions characterize how the teacher attends to relevant disciplinary ideas. Our prospective teachers often focused on the description and qualification of student work, making fewer attempts to make sense of student ideas. However, study participants' abilities to generate inferences were varied and influenced by the nature of students' responses. Findings from this study provide a framework for scaffolding and evaluating progress in teachers' abilities to notice and interpret student work. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52: 585–609, 2015.
This exploratory study was conducted in an introductory biology course to determine 1) how students used the large lecture environment to create their own learning tasks during studying and 2) whether meaningful learning resulted from the students' efforts. Academic task research from the K-12 education literature and student approaches to learning research from the postsecondary education literature provided the theoretical framework for the mixed methods study. The subject topic was cell division. Findings showed that students 1) valued lectures to develop what they believed to be their own understanding of the topic; 2) deliberately created and engaged in learning tasks for themselves only in preparation for the unit exam; 3) used course resources, cognitive operations, and study strategies that were compatible with surface and strategic, rather than deep, approaches to learning; 4) successfully demonstrated competence in answering familiar test questions aligned with their surface and strategic approaches to studying and learning; and 5) demonstrated limited meaningful understanding of the significance of cell division processes. Implications for introductory biology education are discussed.
The theoretical construct of teacher noticing has allowed mathematics teacher educators to examine teacher thinking and practice by looking at the range of activities that teachers notice in the classroom. Guided by this approach to the study of teacher thinking, the central goal of this exploratory study was to identify what prospective science teachers notice when evaluating evidence of student understanding in another teacher's inquiry-based unit. Our results are based on the qualitative analysis of 43 prospective teachers' evaluations of assessment evidence presented to them in the form of a video case and associated written artifacts. Analysis of our data revealed two major categories of elements, Task-General and Task-Specific, noticed by our study participants. Task-General elements included attention to learning objectives, independent student work, and presentation issues and they often served to guide or qualify the specific inquiry skills that were evaluated. Task-Specific elements included the noticing of students' abilities to perform different components of an investigation. In general, study participants paid attention to important general and specific aspects of student work in the context of inquiry. However, they showed preferential attention to those process skills associated with designing an investigation versus those practices related to the analysis of data and generation of conclusions. Additionally, their interpretations of assessment outcomes were largely focused on the demonstration of general science process skills; much less attention was paid to the analysis of the epistemological validity or scientific plausibility of students' ideas. Our results provide insights into the design of meaningful learning experiences for prospective teachers that elicit, challenge, and enrich their conceptions of student understanding in the context of inquiry. ß
Formative assessment has been recognised as a critical element in teaching for conceptual development. A case study research design was employed to: (1) characterise the assessment thinking of three science instructors at a researchbased university; and (2) examine the complex relationship between instructor thinking and practice by encouraging experimentation with alternative assessment strategies. Interviews, reflective journals, field notes and course documents were the data sources used to create a single case study that documented the development of these university instructors' assessment thinking during their experimentation with formative assessment strategies. Throughout two semesters of experimentation, the instructors' assessment thinking became more sophisticated; they grew to view the purpose of assessment less as a summative activity used for the assignment of marks and more as a tool for diagnosing student learning. However, more sophisticated thinking was not associated with revisions in teaching practice based on formative assessment data. Further investigations are needed to more completely understand the nature of assessment thinking and how assessment thinking influences assessment practices. Implications for professional development of university-level science instructors include personalised experiences through which instructors can become active participants in gathering evidence of student learning that promotes growth in assessment thinking.
The purpose of this qualitative exploratory study was to identify factors that influenced prospective and experienced secondary level science teachers' reasoning as they evaluated or selected tasks to formatively assess their students' understanding of scientific concepts. The analysis of the coded written responses revealed two categories of factors that influenced the teachers' reasoning: (1) characteristics of the task and (2) characteristics of students or the curriculum. Characteristics of the task related to qualities of the task regardless of the learning environment in which it would be used, such as the level of student thinking demanded by a task. Characteristics of the students and the curriculum related to the learning environment in which an assessment task would be implemented, such as students' abilities to complete the task. Both prospective and experienced teachers' task evaluations were influenced by the same factors related to the characteristics of the task, although their interpretations of the meaning of each factor varied. In addition, experienced teachers' task evaluations were more likely than prospective teachers to be influenced by factors related to characteristics of students and the curriculum. The findings are discussed as a conceptual framework that presents the identified factors along three different dimensions: (1) the influence of task, student, and curriculum characteristics, (2) the influence of expectations for success, and (3) the influence of teaching experience. ß
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