Development and Piloting of a Rubric to Evaluate Science Formative Assessments for Emerging Bilinguals

• In Event: Current Directions and New Insights in Formative Assessment

Abstract

The sociocultural, reform-oriented vision of science formative assessment for emerging bilingual students far outpaces current teaching practice. In order to support teachers in developing classroom assessment approaches that equitably align with the Next Generation Science Standards, tools are needed to guide teacher design and adaptation of assessments to support all students. This paper presents the theoretical framework for the Equitable Science Formative Assessment Rubric (ESFAR), a tool for determining the extent to which teacher-created science formative assessments include components commonly believed to be critical to support emerging bilingual learners. We then use the ESFAR to examine the quality of fourteen formative assessments created by biology teachers at one culturally and linguistically diverse high school.

Authors

• Caitlin Fine, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Erin Marie Furtak, University of Colorado - Boulder