Teachers' use of formative assessment (FA) has been shown to improve student outcomes; however, teachers enact FA in many ways. We examined classroom videos of nine experienced teachers of elementary, middle, and high school science, aiming to create a model of FA enactment that is useful to teachers.We developed a coding scheme through a validation-in-use approach to characterize teachers' practices using three streams of data that included teachers' self-interviews about the purposes and outcomes of their FAs, our analysis of their noticing/interpreting and acting, and their comments on intentions behind the teaching acts they considered significant.In contrast to cycles of eliciting-noticing-interpreting-acting, we found noticing/interpreting to be central to FA enactment, driving teachers' eliciting or advancing acts. We characterized ways of noticing/interpreting as more authoritative or dialogic and observed that eliciting acts and advancing acts occurred along a similar range. Teachers' in-the-moment purposes and larger learning goals were synthesized as they made choices about teaching acts. The model is framed in terms of utility to teachers to examine their own FA practices, with the aim of becoming better equipped to strategically enact FA in intentional ways to achieve their purposes.
Chemical scientists and engineers are interested in controlling chemical processes to attain specific goals, from synthesizing a desired substance to hindering a particular transformation. Nevertheless, students typically have few opportunities to develop the understandings and practices that are required to effectively engage in chemical control. In this study, we investigated similarities and differences among individuals with different levels of expertise in chemistry in the ways they think about how to control and act to control a chemical reaction. Our findings revealed that all types of study participants engage in the manipulation of similar control parameters but with different approaches and purposes. In particular, we observed a shift from a focus on physical to chemical factors, from experienced-based to model-based reasoning, from qualitative to quantitative methods, and from trial-and-error to guided investigation approaches in the thinking and acting of the more novice to the more expert participants in our study.
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