Building Communities for Everyday Assessment: Reviewing studies of the Formative Assessment Design Cycle (Poster 1)

• In Event: Research on STEM Professional Learning Communities: Attending to Teacher Learning, Agency, and Equity

Abstract

Objectives
The past two decades have witnessed the intersection of [at least] three major reforms in science education: First, in the ways that science teachers engage students in learning about the natural world through three-dimensional learning experiences (Board on Science Education, 2012); second, renewed efforts to engage teachers in ongoing, school-based professional learning that supports them in responding to problems of practice, trying new instructional approaches, and exploring evidence of student learning (National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015); and third, a school-based accountability movement in which assessment is geared toward student achievement on standardized tests (Braaten et al., 2017).
In this context, our research team has developed and studied an approach to teacher professional learning, the Formative Assessment Design Cycle ([FADC]; Authors 2014; Authors, 2014). Working in school-based professional learning communities, the FADC engages teachers in a five-step, iterative process in which teachers explore student thinking, design assessment tasks, practice enacting those tasks, collect data from using the task with students, and reflect on next steps for instruction.
For the past fifteen years, a growing team of researchers has investigated the influence of teacher participation in the FADC on a number of outcomes, in studies situated in schools and school districts, and using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches. This poster presents synthesized findings from published manuscripts to inform the field of the efficacy of the FADC in supporting teacher learning.

Theoretical framework
We leverage sociocognitive (Penuel & Shepard, 2016) and situative (Moss, 2008) views of learning to articulate how tools such as planning guides, checklists, and learning progressions (e.g. Corcoran, Mosher & Rogat, 2009), used in concert with routines for planning, enacting, and reflecting together (e.g. Thompson et al., 2019), can support teachers in improving their practice over time.

Methods
We conducted a research synthesis of manuscripts that included the FADC as an approach to professional learning including doctoral dissertations, published conference proceedings, book chapters, and peer reviewed journal articles. We excluded book chapters that summarized previous findings, as well as unpublished conference presentations and papers.
At the time of proposal submission, our approach yielded 19 articles for inclusion. We created a spreadsheet that summarized each article, including sample size, context, and major findings, and then used the spreadsheet to identify themes across the studies.

Results
The included studies indicate how teachers participating in the FADC were increasingly able to interpret student ideas both in writing and in classroom practice (Authors, 2016; Authors, 2021). The studies were conducted in different institutional contexts, suggesting ways that administrative support can constrain (Author, 2020) but also enable teachers to work together to improve their teaching practices (Henson, 2019). In addition, across seven different schools, the FADC resulted in teachers coordinating their practices around common sets of formative assessment tasks. The poster will present full synthesized themes across the published work.

Significance
The study contributes to the literature on how the set of the routines contained in the FADC can support shifts in teachers’ formative assessment classroom practices.

Author

• Erin Marie Furtak, University of Colorado - Boulder