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The way teachers design activities and interact with students during instruction directly impacts students' opportunities to learn (OTL). Previous research has shown the merits of formative assessment (FA) in supporting students' active sense-making, leading to improved student success outcomes. We examined 22 STEM teachers' classroom videos, performing FA in class, taken from two different years of teaching in high-need districts. We then coded the videos according to two basic teaching moves - eliciting information about students' thinking or advanced learning. These moves can also be categorized as more authoritative (univocal) class discourse or more dialogic (multivocal). Our results show that thirteen out of the twenty-two teachers in this study diversified their teaching moves over time as they gained experience while persisting in high-need districts. The results also suggest five different teachers' clusters, representing different changes over time in these teachers' teaching moves. Teachers' reflections on challenges they faced while teaching and changes in their assessment practices over time suggest that changes in their teaching purposes resulted in shifting their teaching moves. These shifts supported their students' different challenges, building meaningful relationships with their students, and allowing them more OTL. 

In a time of increasing globalization, it is crucial that students are prepared to use their science knowledge to reason, solve problems, and practice socially responsible decision-making. Thus, teachers need to develop assessment strategies that monitor and enhance these competencies. Research suggests that teachers can enact formative assessment (FA) in this way, however, they often focus on how students’ answers compare to the canon as represented by the curriculum. When shifting toward FA enactment that is more responsive to student reasoning, teachers encounter various conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political dilemmas. Here, we present an analytical framework that can be used to analyze influences on the development of teacher FA practices and strategies teachers use to overcome dilemmas. Our development of this analytical framework is based on cultural-historical activity theory and is comprised of two stages. First, we present an initial analytical framework developed using activity theory to interpret and combine Windschitl’s (2002) dilemma categories and Dini et al.’s (2020) FA enactment model. Second, we present the refinement of this initial framework through a case study of two teacher cases. The impact of this novel analytical framework on research and practice is discussed.