Designing Scaffolds to Support Teacher Use of a Learning Progression for Formative Assessment Tools and Practice

• In Event: Designing for Teacher Learning and Enduring Reform Within Science Education

Abstract

The past 10 years have witnessed a relative explosion of learning progressions, or representations of how student ideas and practices develop over a course of time, as supports for science curriculum and assessment development (e.g. Alonzo & Gotwals, 2012; Duschl, Maeng & Sezen, 2011). Several researchers have argued for the efficacy of these learning progressions as scaffolds for teachers’ classroom formative assessment practices (e.g. Bennett, 2011; Heritage, 2008) However, learning progressions are not transparent carriers of meaning (Furtak, 2012), and often present information about student learning in ways that are not necessarily congruous with other representations usually accessible to teachers (Furtak, Morrison & Kroog, 2014).
This poster presents data collected as part of an NSF-supported study which engaged teachers from three partner high schools in long-term, site-based professional development centered around a learning progression and teachers’ iterative design and enactment of formative assessment tools. The study was situated in the context of teachers’ natural selection instruction, and the learning progression that was the centerpiece of the study represented how students’ ideas about natural selection were expected to develop over a three-week unit in high school biology. We held on-site professional development meetings with teachers at the three schools for three academic years oriented around the Formative Assessment Design Cycle (Furtak & Heredia, 2014).
By drawing on multiple sources of data, including videotaped professional development meetings (approximately 10 per year for each school, a total of 90 videotapes), facilitation guides, fieldnotes, and collected artifacts, this poster traces the evolution of a series of tools the research team designed to support teachers in unpacking the learning progression, and using the information it contained to design formative assessments, anticipate the types of ideas those assessments might surface, and how they would respond to those ideas during instruction.
At the beginning of the study, we adapted descriptions of the dimensions and levels of the learning progression into a multiple-page booklet for teachers; however, the research team quickly noted that teachers rarely, if ever, drew upon these booklets during the process of formative assessment design. In subsequent years of the study, we created new descriptions of the learning progression to make their descriptions more accessible to teachers, ultimately designing a set of tools that helped teachers to anticipate student ideas that might surface during formative assessment, as well as guides to help them anticipate and respond to student ideas during instruction. On the basis of this analysis, we developed a set of design principles, to be presented in the poster, to guide the creation of tools to support teacher engagement in learning progressions.
Given that the Next Generation Science Standards are based upon learning progression similar to those used in this study, we frame our findings in the context of developing scaffolds to help teachers interpret and draw upon the new standards to inform their design of classroom activities and their classroom practices.

Author

• Erin Marie Furtak, University of Colorado - Boulder