Designing Formative Assessment Into Ambitious Instructional Units for Secondary-Level English Learners

• In Event: Ecological/Sociocultural Approaches to Educative Curriculum Design and Assessment

Abstract

Formative assessment improves learning. That was the conclusion that Black and Wiliam (1998) drew from their now-famous review of a wide body of research relating to classroom assessment, and which subsequent research has supported (e.g., Andersson & Palm, 2017; Brown & Harris, 2014, Supovitz et al., 2018).
Formative assessment refers to a range of practices that encourage teachers and students to obtain evidence of how learning is evolving with the intention of using evidence to inform ongoing learning (Black et al., 2003; Heritage & Harrison, 2019). These practices include clear learning goals and success criteria, eliciting evidence of learning, interpreting and using evidence, and self- and peer assessment (Andrade & Heritage, 2018; Leahy, et al., 2005).
This paper reports on an effort to increase teachers’ uptake of formative assessment and become more effective in its implementation. Black & Wiliam (1998) emphasized the importance of opportunities for students to express their thinking being designed into any piece of teaching. Our thesis is that when teachers have access to ambitious English language arts (ELA) instructional units that provide specific guidance for how formative assessment can be incorporated into the here and now of teaching and learning activities, they will recognize its potential to student learning and improve their implementations skills.
We will illustrate how learning goals and success criteria are provided for critical tasks in three ELA units and are written in ways that should be understandable to students. The units are grounded in a perspective on learning for secondary-level English Learners in which disciplinary concepts and analytical practices are not distinct from the linguistic means through which understanding is developed and expressed. Therefore, the learning goals and success criteria address both content and language learning. The importance of ensuring students’ understanding of what the goals and criteria entail is stressed. We will illustrate how the ELA units draw teachers’ attention to sources of evidence generated from the tasks (observing, listening, questioning, and analyzing student work) that they can use to inform instruction throughout the lesson to keep students’ learning moving forward, as well as the suggestions for possible instructional actions they might make based on the potential evidence.
We will report on two pilot studies in large urban school districts of the implementation of formative assessment in the units, one that is currently being conducted and a second in fall, 2022. Key lines of inquiry for the pilot studies are:
• Which assessment opportunities did the teachers use?
• In what ways were they able to focus on students’ content and language learning?
• What did they find out about their students’ learning status?
• What action did they take?
• What challenges did they experience?
• What additional support would they like to have?
We plan to use the results of these lines of enquiry to engage in iterative development of the formative assessment opportunities in the unit, including empirically-derived student and teacher responses. We anticipate that the pilot results will offer insights into how teachers can be supported to implement formative assessment, more generally.

Authors

• Margaret Heritage, Heritage Consulting
  Presenting Author

• E. Caroline Wylie, Center for Assessment
  Presenting Author