Exploring prospective teachers' assessment practices: Noticing and interpreting student understanding in the assessment of written work

Abstract

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.

Characterizing teacher attention to student thinking: A role for epistemological messages

“…Instead, I suggest that in order for students to productively learn science, the scientific facets of epistemology must be coupled with particular approaches to knowledge building that can be characterized in a domain-general way. This view of epistemological messages as involving both domaingeneral and domain-specific components is consistent with work by others in the field (e.g., Talanquer et al, 2015). For example, Oliveira et al (2012) who highlight how teacher discourse communicates messages both about personal epistemologies and disciplinary epistemologies (NOS).…”

“…Windschitl and coworkers (Thompson, Windschitl, & Braaten, 2013;Windschitl et al, 2011) describe how the lowest-level teachers check "to see if students 'get it'" while in the highest-level teachers "elicit and use students' current conceptions of science ideas to reshape the direction of classroom conversations" (Windschitl et al, 2011(Windschitl et al, , p. 1357. Others distinguish between levels of teacher attention in which the lowest level involves merely stating or describing an idea and the highest level involves some synthesis or explanation (Rosebery, Warren, & Tucker-Raymond, 2016;Santagata & Angelici, 2010;Sherin & Han, 2004;Tekkumru Kisa & Stein, 2015;Talanquer, Bolger, & Tomanek, 2015;Walkoe, 2015). Notice that in each of these schemes, levels are defined in a domain-independent way.…”

“…While the particulars of the student ideas may be different in math and science, whether teachers connect those ideas to determine next steps in instruction is not disciplinarily specific. In contrast, Talanquer et al (2015) explicitly include both "domain-neutral" and "domain-dependent" aspects in their characterizations of novice, emerging, and advanced teacher attention. Work that divides teacher attention to student thinking into levels of sophistication is beneficial for the field because it allows us to easily track growth in teachers over time and potentially across contexts.…”

Class Tournament as an Assessment Method in Physics Courses: A Pilot Study

“…Summative assessment can be performed in many ways (Black et al, 2010(Black et al, , 2011McTighe & O'Connor, 2005;Scriven, 1967), though written tests are still the most prevalent (Talanquer et al, 2015;Taras, 2009;Vercellati et al, 2013). However, in different fields a few researchers have come up with an idea of carrying out assessment in some alternative manners (Dochy et al, 1999;Rebello, 2011;Schuwirth & Vleuten, 2004).…”

Tres Elementos Fundamentales en La Formación De Docentes De Ciencias

“…El maestro debe estar dispuesto a escuchar lo que los estudiantes tienen que decir, no con el fin de evaluar si es correcto o incorrecto sino para tratar de darle sentido, interpretarlo con base en sus conocimientos sobre ideas alternativas y encontrar semillas intelectuales que sirvan como sustento para la construcción de conocimientos, habilidades o actitudes más alineadas con el saber y el quehacer disciplinarios (Levin y Richards, 2011;Robertson, Scherr y Hammer, 2016). La evaluación formativa se debe conceptualizar como un acto de construcción y no de corrección del pensamiento de los estudiantes (Talanquer, Bolger y Tomanek, 2015).…”