Eliciting, Identifying, Interpreting, and Responding to Students’ Ideas: Teacher Candidates’ Growth in Formative Assessment Practices

Abstract

With the goal of helping teacher candidates become well-started beginners, it is important that methods courses in teacher education programs focus on high-leverage practices. Using responsive teaching practices, specifically eliciting, identifying, interpreting, and responding to students' science ideas (i.e., formative assessment), can be used to support all students in learning science successfully. This study follows seven secondary science teacher candidates in a yearlong practice-based methods course. Course assignments (i.e., plans for and reflections on teaching) as well as teaching videos were analyzed using a recursive qualitative approach. In this paper, we present themes and patterns in teacher candidates' abilities to elicit, identify, interpret, and respond to students' ideas. Specifically, we found that those teacher candidates who grew in the ways in which they elicited students' ideas from fall to spring were also those who were able to adopt a more balanced reflection approach (considering both teacher and student moves). However, we found that even the teacher candidates who grew in these practices did not move toward seeing students' ideas as nuanced; rather, they saw students' ideas in a dichotomous fashion: right or wrong. We discuss implications for teacher preparation, specifically for how to promote productive reflection and tools for better understanding students' ideas.

Investigation of an Alternatively Certified New High School Chemistry Teacher’s Assessment Literacy

“…Effective assessment practices in science require teachers to provide a constructivist, student-centered learning environment and for specific to assessment, know how to elicit student" ideas, use content knowledge to interpret elicited ideas and provide content specific and informative feedback and revisions to meet students" needs (Gottheiner & Siegel, 2012;Gotwals & Birmingham, 2016;Harshman & Yezierski, 2017;Kang, Thompson & Windschitl, 2014;Vogelzang & Admiral, 2017). A teacher"s constructivist view of learning and her knowledge and motivation to put this view into practice are important for the achievement of providing a learner-centered instruction and formative assessment (Box et al, 2015;Chen & Wei, 2015;Fletcher & Shaw, 2012).…”

“It’s 1000 Degrees in Here When I Teach”: Providing Preservice Teachers With an Extended Opportunity to Approximate Ambitious Instruction

“…We share the stance of our colleagues (e.g., Horn & Campbell, 2015; Sun & van Es, 2015) who argue that the development of pedagogical judgment to respond to unanticipated features of instruction, such as student thinking and actions, is a difficult aspect of ambitious teaching to learn. As the core feature of ambitious teaching is the elicitation and revision of ideas, novices need opportunities to “notice” and use students’ ideas as resources to make instructional adaptations (Gotwals & Birmingham, 2015; Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011; Stroupe, 2016; Tekkumru & Stein, 2015). In our methods class, we wanted novices to rehearse exercising pedagogical judgment in the face of uncertainty (Zeichner, 2012).…”

Elementary Teachers’ Responsiveness to Supporting Students’ Engineering Design Feedback

“…At the heart of this study is elementary teachers' capacity to enact responsive science teaching (Ball, 1993;Hammer & vanZee, 2006;Gotwals & Birmingham, 2016;Robertson et al, 2016;Watkins et al, 2018;Wendell et al, 2016;Wendell et al, 2019). A responsive approach to teaching requires teachers to adapt, discover, and execute instructional moves in response to student thinking (Robertson et al, 2016).…”

“…A responsive approach to teaching requires teachers to adapt, discover, and execute instructional moves in response to student thinking (Robertson et al, 2016). In this approach, teachers initially elicit students' ideas about a particular phenomenon (Gotwals & Birmingham, 2016). From there, the teacher's role is to support students' engagement and attend to and/or take up students' thinking by building on their ideas and encouraging engagement in discourse that demonstrates their capacity to reason, evaluate, and optimize their understanding (Wendell et al, 2016).…”