Discursive Travels on the Paths of Design: A Design-Based Research Case Study

• In Event: Documenting Teacher Change and Shifts in Practice Over Time

Abstract

The state of Virginia has called for districts and teachers to design authentic assessments in history and social studies. This study examines the discursive development of social studies teachers engaged in the assessment-design processes. A design-based research model was employed to test assumptions about the hypothesized relationships between program design and teacher learning. We present a case study of one of those teachers in which we describe how his conceptual understanding of assessment changed, how he navigated the tradeoffs inherent in assessment design, and the extent to which his designed assessments changed over the course of the one-year professional-development program. We found that over time our participant shifted his priorities from subjectivity to objectivity in his assessment designs.

Authors

• Gabriel Aaron Reich, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Kimberly Rose Bowman, Virginia Commonwealth University