Describing the Invisible: Teacher Knowledge and Practices for Assessment

• In Event: Classroom-Based STEM Assessment: Current Status and Future Directions

Abstract

Teaching is a practice with heavy epistemic demands. Teachers must continually generate and use knowledge about student thinking in order to inform their instruction. After all, a teacher is often in the same position as a physician where the efficacy of the practitioner’s care heavily depends on the practitioner’s diagnosis of a person’s needs. This means assessment is a fundamental practice for teachers with significant impact on students’ learning (Black & William, 1998; Author, 2001; Kingston & Nash, 2011). This is why 67% of 8th grade mathematics teachers reported that they adjust their instruction multiple times a week in response to students’ learning, and around half of all high school math and science teachers reported that formative assessment was a significant focus of their professional development in recent years (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2021; Author, 2018b).
However, high quality classroom-based assessment is a challenging practice for teachers. Since it is a practice, it can never be reduced to a set of skills or ideas but is always maintained in relation to often unpredictable human beings (Grossman et al., 2009). In addition to the dynamic nature of the practice, teachers’ assessments of their students’ thinking are always assessments of traits they can not see, which requires a constant coordination of the visible with the invisible (Author, 2002). This means researchers, policy makers, and practitioners all must work to support teachers to engage in high quality classroom-based assessment practices.
In this talk we draw on over two decades of research to argue that teachers need support in three domains in order to carry out high quality assessment in their classrooms. First, teachers need models of student cognition that are empirically grounded, developmental, and interpretable to teachers (e.g. Lehrer et al., 2014). Second, teachers need feasible strategies for eliciting valid evidence of student thinking (e.g. Author, 2016). Third, teachers need tools that support interpretations of the generated evidence in terms of the cognitive model (Confrey & Shah, 2021). We will describe each of these domains, and argue that classroom-based assessment research and practice organized around Learning Trajectories/Progressions can support teachers to engage in high quality assessment practices by contributing to each of these domains. In addition, we illustrate our argument using three examples of research programs in statistics, math, and science.

Authors

• Ryan Seth Jones, Middle Tennessee State University
  Presenting Author

• Eric Banilower, Horizon Research, Inc.
  Presenting Author