More Like this

1. Building a Professional Learning Community around Science Assessment: Designing and Using Assessment Tasks to Support Multi-Dimensional Instruction

   Gane, Brian D; Lehman, Elizabeth M; Bates, Meg S; Zaidi, Sania Z; Lee-Hassan, Alexa WC; Gaur, Diksha; Madden, Krystal; Pellegrino, James W (January 2020, The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020)

   We report on early-stage outcomes of a 4-year research and development project aimed at understanding how to build and sustain the capacity of teachers to instruct and formatively assess in ways that are aligned with the NRC’s Framework for K-12 Science Education (i.e., multi-dimensional learning). In particular, we are building a professional learning community (PLC) around assessment of the U.S. Next Generation Science Standards, predicated on teachers designing assessment tasks that support instruction. 

   more » « less
2. Delivering Formative Assessment and Reflecting on Student Learning as Components of Elementary Teacher Professional Learning

   Summers, Ryan; Lee, Min_Jung; Inouye, Martha; Hammack, Rebekah; Macias, Meghan (January 2025, Association for Science Teacher Education (ASTE))

   Teachers in small communities may be geographically isolated and have smaller collegial networks. Consequently, teachers in these settings may have limited exposure to contemporary strategies for engaging learners in science and engineering as suggested in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Thus, we provided a 5-day online PL experience and a year-long of modest supports (e.g., online professional learning community) to over 150 rural teachers from four states (CA, MT, ND, WY) to bridge the access gap and to enhance their instructional capabilities in teaching NGSS-aligned science and engineering lessons. Considering that the quality of the questions posed in a formative assessment impacts the quality of student thinking and what it reveals, we provided a formative assessment task, “Planning a Park” developed by Stanford NGSS Assessment Project (SNAP) and SCALE Science at WestEd, to participating teachers to implement in their classrooms. Teachers received online professional learning opportunities about the task before and after administering it in their classrooms. To understand their experiences with the task, we collected multiple data sources for triangulation, such as surveys about teachers’ preparedness to implement science lessons, teachers’ self-reported observations while delivering the task, their reflections about students’ performance, examples of student responses to the task, and interview responses from a sub-sample of teachers. As an initial analysis, we employed a descriptive coding process to capture teachers’ diverse experiences with the SCALE task (Saldaña, 2021). In this session, we will report rural teachers’ experiences with the formative assessment task that was provided as part of a year of modest supports. We believe this study will support the science education community, especially individuals preparing teachers to teach science and researchers on assessment, by sharing the benefits of implementing a formative assessment task during inservice teachers’ professional learning. 

   more » « less
3. Computer Science Teaching Knowledge: A Framework and Assessment (Abstract Only)

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3022399  

   Hubbard, Aleata; Kao, Yvonne (March 2017, SIGCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)

   Educators, researchers, politicians, tech companies, and others continue to advocate for the importance of K-12 students learning computer science in our increasingly tech-driven society. One way school districts in the United States address this growing demand is by allowing teachers certified in other disciplines to lead computer science courses. Summer and weekend professional development opportunities support these educators in developing the expertise needed for effective computer science teaching, but a great portion of their learning to teach computer science will occur through on-the-job experiences. Our four-year NSF EHR grant explores how a job-embedded professional development program that pairs high school teachers with tech industry professionals supports educators in acquiring computer science teaching knowledge. The research presented in this poster focuses on the third year of the study and includes (a) a theoretical component focused on creating a framework to explain on-the-job computer science teaching knowledge development based on case studies with six teachers, and (b) an empirical component focused on the creation and administration of a computer science teaching knowledge assessment. By the time of the SIGCSE symposium, we expect to have pre-test results from the first administration of our teaching knowledge assessment, completed by both high school teachers and their collaborating tech industry professionals. This poster will present our theoretical framework, resultant teaching knowledge assessment with sample items, and analysis of participants' assessment responses and their relationship to specific teaching experiences. 

   more » « less
4. Promoting shifts in teachers’ understanding and use of phenomena in instruction and assessment

   Lo, Abraham S.; Glidewell, Loraine; O’Connor, Keelin; Allen, Anna-Ruth; Herrmann-Abell, Cari F.; Penuel, William R.; Wingert, Kerri; Lindsay, William (July 2022, Computersupported collaborative learning)

   Chinn, Clark; Tan, Edna; Chan, Carol K.; Kali, Yael (Ed.)

   This paper examines an online professional learning intervention to develop teachers’ pedagogical design capacity to develop five-dimensional (5D) learning and assessment opportunities, which involve integrated use of science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts in science to make sense of phenomena and problems that are interesting to students and support students as knowers, doers, and users of science. We present findings from our design study, which suggest both the promise of such an approach and some of the challenges and tensions experienced by teachers as they chose and used phenomena to support 5D learning opportunities for students. 

   more » « less
5. Learning Theory, Classroom Assessment, and Equity

   Kang, H; Furtak, E. (March 2021, Educational measurement issues and practice)

   Despite increasing awareness about the role of classroom assessments in perpetuating educational inequities, the research community continues to struggle with how to support teachers to design and use classroom assessments for achieving equity. In response to recent calls to better connect learning theory to the design of classroom assessments, we explore the links among contemporary learning theories, classroom assessments, equity, and teachers’ professional learning. Building a conceptual argument that we should shift our attention from assessment tasks to a classroom activity system to better support minoritized students’ learning via classroom assessment, we examine how teachers participate in assessment codesign activities in two research-practice partnerships (RPPs), and then identify emerging tensions in relation to promoting equity. Each RPP drew upon contemporary learning theories—sociocognitive and sociocultural learning theories, respectively—to create a coherent system of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The examples show that the tensions emerging from each project are at least partially related to the learning theory that led the researchers to set up professional learning settings in a particular way. Our findings suggest that managing these tensions is an inherent part of the work as researchers seek to support equitable student learning. We discuss specific implications for the assessment community. 

   more » « less