Exploring the influence of learning progressions in two teacher communities

Abstract

Learning progressions, or sequences of how ideas and practices develop within domains, are increasingly a focus of science education research. Recently, researchers have called for these progressions to be used as interpretive frameworks for teachers' instructional planning and assessment practices. In this study, we explore data from two high schools collected in two studies. In the first study, we engaged with teachers to develop and refine a learning progression for natural selection alongside formative assessments. In the second study, we took this learning progression to teachers at a different school, and used it to co-develop formative assessments and plan units. We adopt a communities of practice perspective to frame two case studies of these schools, taking the learning progression as a boundary object that not only maintained its meaning across the two different communities, but also took up different meanings within each community. We found that the learning community that helped to develop the learning progression used it as an opportunity to bring previously disparate units into sync, and to develop and enact a common sequence of formative assessments within their unit. In contrast, at the second school, teachers struggled to make sense of the learning progression within the accountability context of their school, as well as other tools provided them by the school and district. These results indicate that teachers could potentially benefit from the opportunity to co-develop learning progressions with researchers that capture their ideas that are shared within the community; however, if learning progressions are not in sync with other tools provided to teachers to structure their planning, they will not be taken up in the same way. # 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 51:982-1020, 2014.

A learning progression should address regression: Insights from developing non‐linear reasoning in ecology

“…The concentration of the present study on learning products wishes to underscore the importance of formative assessment for aligning curricula, instruction, and assessment in LPs (e.g., Duschl et al, ; Furtak & Heredia, ; Lehrer & Schauble, ; Yin et al, ). Learning products could serve as templates to timely diagnose the distance of actual learner performance from optimal performance.…”

“…Further, pre‐post formats do not allow educators to offer support and guidance to learners as long as a learning activity sequence unfolds, whereby formative assessment would lose much of its practical use (Black et al, ; Briggs & Peck, ; Yin et al, ). Recent studies called for a thorough analysis of learner reasoning to diagnose learner performance and provide timely feedback to learners (Furtak & Heredia, ; Gunckel, Covitt, Salinas, & Anderson, ; Lehrer & Schauble, ). A third challenge for embedding formative assessments in LPs has been to identify proper timing for educators to intervene before moving forward (Lehrer & Schauble, ; Penuel, ; Yin et al, ).…”

Promoting student progressions in science classrooms: A video study

“…Understanding and using LPFs are challenging for teachers. Researchers found that, when using LPFs to interpret students’ thinking, teachers tend to take a fragmented view of student thinking (Alonzo & Elby, ) and treat students’ ideas as misconceptions to be corrected rather than resources for learning (Furtak & Heredia, ); when using LPFs to inform teaching, teachers often think of instructional strategies only at a very general level such as using more hands‐on activities (Alonzo & Elby, ; Jin et al, ).…”

“…Some researchers have assessed learning outcomes of interventions that used learning progression‐based curriculum (Jin, Zhan, & Anderson, ; Plummer & Krajcik, ; Songer, Kelcey, & Gotwals, ). Others have studied teachers’ understanding of learning progressions (Jin, Shin, Johnson, Kim, & Anderson, ) and teachers’ use of learning progressions in planning and implementing lessons (Furtak, ; Furtak & Heredia, ). An introduction to the learning progression approach and examples of learning progression studies can be found in Barrett and Jin () and Stevens, Gotwals, Jin, and Barrett ().…”

Agreement of Teachers on Evaluating Assessments of Learning Progressions in English Language Arts and Mathematics

“…It consists of ordered levels, which are qualitative descriptions of observable student behaviors as thinking develops from intuitive (and sometimes problematic) ideas to conceptions that are increasingly advanced, nuanced, and precise (see Confrey, Maloney, Nguyen, Mojica, & Myers, ; Corcoran, Mosher, & Rogat, ; Deane, Sabatini, & O'Reilly, ; National Research Council, , ; Simon, ; Smith, Wiser, Anderson, Krajcik, & Coppola, ). Research on the development and validation of LPs is now widespread in the educational sciences (e.g., Alonzo & Gotwals, ; Black, Wilson, & Yao, ; Briggs & Peck, ; Graf & van Rijn, ; Steedle & Shavelson, ; van Rijn, Graf, & Deane, ; West et al, ; Wilmot, Schoenfeld, Wilson, Champney, & Zahner, ; Wilson, ), but there is relatively little research on how an important group of end users (teachers) interprets them for the purpose of assessing and guiding students (Furtak & Heredia, ). In the context of assessment, it cannot be assumed that all teachers (or all researchers) will interpret an LP in the same way, or in the way intended by the developers of the progression, and if they do not, the same student performance may be assigned to different levels of a progression by different users.…”