Abstract
The teaching practices of recognizing and responding to students’ ideas during instruction are often called formative assessment, and can be conceptualized by four abilities: designing formative assessment tasks, asking questions to elicit student thinking, interpreting student ideas, and providing feedback that moves student thinking forward. While these practices have been linked to positive learning outcomes for students, designing and enacting formative assessment tasks in science classrooms presents instructional challenges for teachers. This paper reports on the results of a long-term study of high school biology teachers who participated in a 3 year professional development program, called the Formative Assessment Design Cycle (FADC), which guided them to iteratively design, enact, and reflect upon formative assessments for natural selection in school-based teacher learning communities. Nine teachers participated for three academic years; sources of data included teachers’ interpreting of student ideas in line with a learning progression, the formative assessment tasks they designed each year of the study, videotaped classroom enactment of those tasks, and pre-post test student achievement from the Baseline and final year of the study. Results indicate that, on average, teachers increased on all abilities during the study and changes were statistically significant for interpreting students ideas, eliciting questions, and feedback. HLM models showed that while only the quality of feedback was a significant predictor at Baseline, it was teachers’ task design and interpretation of ideas in Year 3. These results suggest the efficacy of the FADC in supporting teachers’ formative assessment abilities. Findings are interpreted in light of professional development and formative assessment literatures.
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Notes
Our human subjects agreement with the partner school district prohibited us from collecting student-level demographic data.
Note that the likelihood ratio tests may be preferable when there are fewer groups.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the special issue editors for their thoughtful feedback that greatly improved this manuscript, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Andy Maul and Derek Briggs for their technical advice with HLM analyses. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0953375. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Formative assessment task rating items
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1.
What type of space is there in the activity for students to share their ideas?
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1—None/no space for student-provided answers (e.g. lecture slides)
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2—Multiple-choice questions only
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3—Fill-in-the-blank
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4—Short-answer (can include multiple-choice plus justification)
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5—Open, lengthy student-constructed responses (e.g. essay or student-constructed representation)
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2.
What is your impression of the type of instruction that would accompany this activity? Be sure to answer based on how the activity is written, not how you might use it.
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1—None/not applicable
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2—Lecture style of instruction
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3—Teacher-centered questioning
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4—Teacher-student dialogic interaction
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5—Student-led instruction or student–student interaction
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3.
What type of knowledge is being elicited/promoted/targeted?
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1—None/not applicable
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2—Declarative/factual knowledge/recall
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3—Procedures
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4—Schematic knowledge/the ‘big ideas’ of science
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5—Strategic/deciding when or how to use knowledge
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4.
What type of information about student ideas does this activity seem designed to provide?
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1—None/not applicable
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2—Correctness in a binary sense (e.g. right/wrong)
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3—Mostly correctness, but with the potential for a little information about student ideas
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4—Information about what students are thinking
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5—Complex information about student thinking, including common student everyday ideas/misconceptions
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5.
What is the potential of this activity to make students’ scientific understandings visible?
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1—Not applicable
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2—None
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3—Low
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4—Moderate
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5—High
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6.
What is your impression of how difficult or easy it might be to interpret these scientific understandings?
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1—Not applicable/no clear request for information about student ideas in the activity
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2—Not sure
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3—Hard and slow to interpret
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4—Easy to interpret, but it would take some time to go through the answers
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5—Easy and fast to interpret
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Appendix 2: Student idea sorting task
Interviewer questions for teacher:
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1.
I’d like you to take a minute to read through these student responses, and then sort them according to the ideas that they contain. Please talk aloud as you read and make your decisions so we know what you’re thinking.
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2.
How would you describe the kinds of ideas represented in the responses?
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3.
What would you do in class to address the different ideas in the responses?
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4.
Some of these responses have multiple ideas in them; what does that indicate to you about what these students are thinking?
Sorting task—student responses
Number | Student idea |
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1 | I chose a new answer because the color of the bark is what caused the genes in the moth to change from light to dark |
2 | The industrial pollution colored the tree back and the moths turned darker also to avoid being preyed on by birds. The moths had to adapt to their changing environments by changing color |
3 | I chose answer () because that is natural selection. The article said that the lighter moths were the main type of moth, meaning that there were also darker moths. Since the bark slowly became darker, it would take quite a long time for the dominant moth color to change. The darker moths would be producing more, and therefore they would slowly overpopulate the light moths |
4 | I chose () because the colors of the bark of trees was the selective force. Though the colors mutation of peppered moths were random the carriers of the carbonaria survived since it blended into the darker bark of trees. Carriers of carbonaria pass on their genes while most typical moths could not. The change in the color of bark is the selective force which caused the genes to mutate |
5 | I’m saying letter () because the moths had adapted to their environment, even though the moths were light to stand out, they became darker to survive |
6 | Because the birds prey range was limited by their ability to see, and because of the darker trees, the whitish moths were easier to see, and therefore more heavily preyed upon by the birds. This led to the darker moths making more offspring, and therefore a change in population |
7 | I chose () because it described more of what happened than the others. A change in the color of the bark caused the light colored moths to be more visible, a mutation in one of the moths caused it to be black. More black ones survived than white ones because they blended with the habitat better so their amount grew |
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Furtak, E.M., Kiemer, K., Circi, R.K. et al. Teachers’ formative assessment abilities and their relationship to student learning: findings from a four-year intervention study. Instr Sci 44, 267–291 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9371-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9371-3