Linking a learning progression for natural selection to teachers' enactment of formative assessment

Abstract

Learning progressions, or representations of how student ideas develop in a domain, hold promise as tools to support teachers' formative assessment practices. The ideas represented in a learning progression might help teachers to identify and make inferences about evidence collected of student thinking, necessary precursors to modifying instruction to help students advance in their learning. The study reported in this article took the novel approach of using a learning progression for natural selection to support teachers' enactment of formative assessment. Sources of data include interviews and videotapes of six high school biology teachers leading assessment conversations around the same formative assessment questions. Results indicate that while teachers picked out and made inferences about student ideas related to the learning progression during assessment conversations, they did not use all parts of the learning progression in the same way. Furthermore, several of the teachers seemed to use the learning progressions simply as catalogs of misconceptions to be “squashed” rather than drawing upon the developmental affordances offered by a learning progression. Results are framed in terms of the utility of learning progressions as supports for classroom practice. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1181–1210, 2012

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

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“…Brodie (2011) illustrates specific discourse moves teachers use in working with their students' thinking including affirming, directing, initiating, informing, and following up. Similarly, other researchers define types of questions and prompts that teachers use to elicit, highlight, interpret, and probe student thinking (Franke et al, 2009;Furtak, 2012;Lineback, 2015;Sleep & Boerst, 2012). Again, notice that many of these discourse moves are domain general.…”

Authoritative Questioning and Science Teaching in Saudi Arabian Context

“…Teachers can embed their questioning through a process of formative assessment and can follow gradual steps that will elicit their students' thinking, make inferences about what that evidence indicates, before responding to the students' ideas (Furtak, 2012). Such processes require teachers to have the ability to identify and be able to deal with the wide range of the students' ideas that underlie their correct and incorrect responses.…”

How Physics Teachers Model Student Thinking and Plan Instructional Responses When Using Learning-Progression-Based Assessment Information

“…Visions for the classroom application of learning progressions (LPs)-"descriptions of the successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about a topic that can follow one another as children learn" [1]-include using diagnostic assessments to determine a student's LP "level" in order to inform decisions about instructional interventions [2][3][4]. This idea has led to interest in commercially-developed LP-based instructional materials, such as assessments and curricula [5].…”