Leveraging Co-Design to Incorporate a Teacher’s Perspective in Bilingual / Multimodal Elementary Classroom Assessment

• In Event: Centering Teacher and Student Voice in Classroom Assessment Design: Possibilities and Tensions Between Research and Reality

Abstract

Objectives
Formative assessments (FA) are classroom activities where students share thinking to receive low-stakes feedback (Black & Wiliam, 1998) and inform educators’ instruction (Brookhart, 2003). Co-design is a facilitated process where educators and researchers collaborate to design, enact, and evaluate tools/routines that address an educational need (Rochelle et al., 2006). As such, co-design offers a method to involve voices often left out of FA design (Nwafor et al., 2023) and to support equity-oriented assessments responsive to different contexts (Author, 2020). This case study explores how including an educator voice through co-design influenced bilingual/multimodal science FAs in one elementary classroom.
Theoretical Framework
The study is framed around participatory design research principles highlighting the importance of educators’ involvement in co-design projects. The framework values their localized understanding of student/community needs, historical knowledge of the district, and experience with potential systemic injustices (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Additionally, it calls for co-designers to unpack tensions inherent in the work.
Context
The five-month study took place at Riverdale, an elementary school located in the Mountain West. Participants included two English/Spanish bilingual researchers, Author1 and Author2, and a Spanish/English bilingual fourth-grade teacher, Sophia. Approximately 90% of students identified as Hispanic, 90% received free/reduced-price lunch, and 48% were identified as English Language Learners (ELLs). Over one Amplify Science unit, we conducted four FA co-design cycles where participants planned a bilingual/multimodal FA aligned with the curriculum, Sophia enacted the FA, and co-design participants debriefed the FA tools and routines while reviewing student work.
Method
Data included seven 60-minute transcripts of co-design meetings, observations of four classroom enactments, FA templates, and transcripts of pre/post interviews with Sophia. Author1 engaged in multiple rounds of inductive and deductive qualitative coding (Miles et al., 2020) using a constant comparative method (Glaser, 1965). Coding focused on instances where Sophia’s contributions and perspectives informed FA tasks.
Findings
Co-design enabled FA tasks to center Sophia’s knowledge of student and community needs. For example, Sophia’s insight that bilingual tasks could facilitate stronger family/community connections to classroom learning while helping students maintain their bilingualism supported our decision to design bilingual tasks. Furthermore, co-design helped us create FA tasks building on Sophia’s curricular expertise. For example, tasks formalized Sophia’s routine of having students return to the anchoring question after new learning to modify their scientific explanations. Finally, centering Sophia’s voice through co-design enabled development of accessible, equity-oriented FA tasks distinct from typical practices in the district that tended to negatively impact students with lower literacy levels and ELLs. For instance, digital multimodal tasks allowed students to respond bilingually through short audio/video recordings, drawings, diagrams, or typed words rather than only through hand-written English-language responses. Tensions included navigating school priorities that regularly kept ‘gap’ students from participating in science due to daily math/literacy tutoring.
Significance
Findings suggest that co-design supports the development of responsive, accessible, and equitable FA tasks. Moreover, co-design can provide teachers agency within top-down assessment systems by validating and building from their localized, critical expertise.

Authors

• Caitlin G. Fine, Metropolitan State University of Denver

• Ingrid Carter, Metropolitan State University of Denver