Formative Assessment to Strengthen English Learners' Effectiveness in Reasoning-Focused STEM Discourse

• In Event: 61.060 - Formative Assessment to Support English Learners' Academic Language Development: Resources for Teachers and Students

Abstract

Purpose
The current content standards’ shift toward collaborative sense-making provides multiple opportunities for formative assessment that attends to and strengthens the oral language that English Learners (ELs) and all students need to effectively propose and collaboratively analyze ideas as they co-construct disciplinary understanding. To realize the opportunities provided by extended meaning-making discussions among students, educators must assess students’ effectiveness with specific aspects of oral language, and develop formative assessment frameworks to guide contingent language instruction. This is of particular importance for teachers of ELs.

Drawing on classroom research, this paper:
(1) presents guidelines for the elicitation of extensive oral language use
(2) considers various metrics by which to formatively evaluate language use
(3) proposes a framework for decision-making about contingent language instruction, which can guide teachers in performing formative assessment for ELs’ oral language development.

Perspective
Our focus on ELs as sense-makers in STEM, along with their classmates, is grounded in a language as action perspective (Lee, Quinn, & Valdés, 2013). In this socioculturally-based approach, shared activity drives language development (Gee, 2005; Rogoff, 2008); more “academic” language develops if and when students experience authentic needs for language that is more clear, precise, or objective. Rather than focusing on preconceived notions of the academic language of STEM, we focus on language for doing STEM, and for effectively making meaning in STEM.

Inherent in this approach is the facilitation of extended oral discussions that may not follow expected pathways. Such discussions provide multiple opportunities for formative language assessment, but educators must know when and how to respond. We propose frameworks to address this need.

Methods
The frameworks are based on an NSF-funded study conducted in STEM classrooms (MacDonald, Miller, & Lord, 2017). The study engaged 16 teachers in two school districts, equally divided across math and science and across Grades 4 and 7, and analyzed classroom observations and teacher interviews to explore teachers’ reflections about the use of discourse facilitation tools to support desired pedagogical shifts.

Results
Results indicated the tools’ usefulness in eliciting and facilitating extended oral dialogue. Building on this STEM classroom study, this paper proposes frameworks for evaluating ELs’ language use during reasoning-focused discourse and for selecting aspects of language use for contingent instruction.

Significance
Increasing educator capacity to formatively assess ELs’ language use and provide contingent language instruction in the context of free-flowing reasoning-focused discourse is critical to ELs’ success, and to redressing persistent inequities in education. In the 2018 National Academies’ report (National Academies Press, 2018), Okhee Lee, an expert in STEM education for ELs, commented:
“If you think of language as a product, as an objective that you have to know English to be able to do science, it excludes students. But if you think of using language as means to the science, it is an entry point. (p. 35)”
We must support educators’ efforts to meet students at this entry point, and to identify and effectively leverage the language learning opportunities presented when ELs engage in the dialogue of doing STEM.

Author

• Rita MacDonald, University of Wisconsin - Madison