Students' Differential Opportunities for Sensemaking in Two Teachers' Enactments of a Co-Designed Formative Assessment Task

• In Event: Reimagining Classroom Assessment System for Creating Equitable Opportunities to Learn

Abstract

Purpose and Perspectives. Current reforms emphasize that students have opportunities to engage in sensemaking around compelling phenomena; that is, the ways in which students “figure out” the world around them, drawing upon everyday and formal knowledge to build an explanation (Odden & Russ, 2019). A challenge to this vision is that tasks designed for sensemaking may be enacted in different ways, creating differential opportunities for students to draw on their prior experiences and try out new ideas. In this paper, we draw upon two epistemological frames that students may invoke as they interpret and participate in classroom tasks (Hutchison & Hammer, 2010; Kapon, 2016) - sensemaking and answer-making - to better understand students’ opportunity to engage in three-dimensional learning. Specifically, in the context of the same formative assessment task, we asked:
How do two teachers provide opportunities for students to engage in sensemaking?
How do these different opportunities for sensemaking relate to students’ models and explanations of a phenomenon?

Methods. This is a case study of two high school biology teachers who participated in bimonthly, on-site professional learning community meetings focused on co-designing three-dimensional formative assessment tasks about energy. We focus on the enactment of one task designed around the phenomenon of how visiting teams experience more fatigue when playing at high altitude venues. The task was designed for students to share their initial ideas, discuss them in groups and as a whole class, and then create revised models.

Data sources and analysis. We analyzed video recordings and fieldnotes of teachers enacting the task. In addition, we collected 134 samples of student work. We segmented the videos into episodes of classroom activity and then applied codes for sensemaking versus answer-making frames. We coded student work according to levels of sophistication for modeling energy and matter in the context of cellular respiration. See Appendix A for a summary of codes.

Findings. Though both teachers enacted the task with similar participation structures (Figure 1), Riley used questions and other facilitation moves to support more of a sensemaking frame while the other teacher, Ashley, supported more of an answer-making frame. Riley leveraged students’ prior experiences as related to the phenomenon; for example, how Argentinian soccer players struggle when playing in Peru. In contrast, Ashley constrained student responses to the key indicators of cellular respiration. Our analyses of students’ written responses indicate that Riley’s students moved to more sophisticated levels of understanding about energy compared to Ashley’s students. Table 1 shows this greater shift with Riley’s students, including a decreased variation across responses and a slightly higher effect size.

Scholarly significance of the study. Our findings suggest that the ways in which students engage in sensemaking may support or constrain their opportunities to advance in their ability to model energy as they participate in a classroom activity. Our analyses furthermore suggest that students’ opportunity to learn - as indicated by shifts in the quality of their models and explanations - are opened up or constrained within these learning environments, even when teachers are enacting the same co-designed task.

Authors

• Clarissa Deverel-Rico, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Erin Marie Furtak, University of Colorado - Boulder