Characterizing the formative assessment enactment of experienced science teachers

Abstract

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.

Examining the Responding Component of Teacher Noticing: A Case of One Teacher’s Pedagogical Responses to Students’ Thinking in Classroom Artifacts

“…For example, at its core "assessment requires attention: Teachers can only assess student reasoning if they are paying attention to it" (Levin et al, 2009, p. 143). Formative assessment also involves interpreting students' contributions to respond in ways that advance students' sense-making (Dini et al, 2020;Gotwals & Birmingham, 2016). Different models of formative assessment have been presented that parse it into separate but related practices with most models involving eliciting, attending, interpreting, and responding to students' thinking (Dini et al, 2020).…”

“…Formative assessment also involves interpreting students' contributions to respond in ways that advance students' sense-making (Dini et al, 2020;Gotwals & Birmingham, 2016). Different models of formative assessment have been presented that parse it into separate but related practices with most models involving eliciting, attending, interpreting, and responding to students' thinking (Dini et al, 2020). Inherent in this literature are the same three components of teacher noticing described previously.…”

“…Thus, efforts to understand and develop teacher noticing skills have become one focus of mathematics and science teacher education research (Robertson et al, 2016;. While this body of research has provided considerable insight into this set of skills, the least understood component of teacher noticing is teachers' capacity to respond to students' thinking (Dini et al, 2020;Jacobs & Ambrose, 2008;Teuscher et al, 2017). This study contributes to filling this gap in knowledge by building upon prior research on teacher noticing and formative assessment and seeking to understand how an experienced teacher responds to what she notices about her students' thinking.…”

“…To engage in this decomposition work, we conducted an exploratory study of an experienced fourth-grade teacher's (Olivia's) practice as she responded to her students' thinking in the context of a semi-structured teacher interview surrounding student work from an integrated mathematics and science unit, which we suggest reflects a formative assessment context. As we were interested in decomposing a practice that many teachers find challenging (Coffey et al, 2011;Dini et al, 2020), we needed clear illustrations of this practice. We therefore purposefully chose to study Olivia's practice as she had built expertise in and maintained a commitment to actively engage in all components of teacher noticing to advance her students' learning.…”

Like the layers of an onion: curricular noticing as a lens to understand the epistemological features of the Philippine K to 12 secondary mathematics curriculum materials

“…Considering that classroom events and episodes occur simultaneously, Dini et al (2020) averred that teacher noticing is necessarily selective which means that teachers would choose to notice some and ignore others. Such tendency holds a number of instructional threats and dangers if teachers were to promote student-centered learning.…”