How Culturally Responsive Formative Assessment Practices Can Expand Students’ Opportunities to Participate in Science Learning

• In Event: Culturally Responsive Assessment in Classrooms: Theory, Research, and Practice

Abstract

Culturally responsive approaches to science teaching encourage us to consider how classroom assessment - both in its design and enactment - can create space for learners to make connections with their prior experiences as they make sense of phenomena that are interesting to them and relevant to their lives. In this chapter, we examine the enactments of two phenomenon-based, high school biology formative assessment tasks to understand the ways in which variations in teachers’ responsiveness to student ideas through their classroom practices can enable students’ learning. We highlight how even when tasks are the same, students' opportunities to learn through formative assessment can be expanded by the ways teachers structure learning environments around the tasks. We use coded classroom data to illustrate how teachers encouraged students to share their experiences, use everyday language, and their own ways of cultural expression to make sense of scientific phenomena. We use the lens of culturally responsive teaching to inform our discussion of implications for practice and to identify future directions for science formative assessment.

Authors

• Erin Marie Furtak, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Clarissa de Oliveira Deverel-Rico, BSCS Science Learning