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This study explores the role of unconventional forms of classroom assessments in expanding minoritized students' opportunities to learn (OTL) in high school physics classrooms. In this research + practice partnership project, high school physics teachers and researchers co‐designed a unit about momentum to expand minoritized students' meaningful OTL. Specifically, the unit was designed to (a) expand what it means to learn and be good at science using unconventional forms of assessment, (b) facilitate students to leverage everyday experiences, concerns, and home languages to do science, and (c) support teachers to facilitate meaningful dialogical interactions. The analysis focused on examining minoritized students' OTLs mediated by intentionally designed, curriculum‐embedded, unconventional forms of assessments. The participants were a total of 76 students in 11th or 12th grade. Data were gathered in the form of student assessment tasks, a science identity survey, and interviews. Data analysis entailed: (a) statistical analysis of student performance measured by conventional and unconventional assessments and (b) qualitative analysis of two Latinx students' experiences with the co‐designed curriculum and assessments. The findings suggest that the use of unconventional forms of curriculum‐embedded assessment can increase minoritized students' OTLifthe assessment facilitates minoritized students to personally and deeply relate themselves to academic tasks.

 

These narratives explore what it might entail to begin school–university partnerships towards the goal of transformative social changes through the voices of two women scholars of color. Using two school–university partnerships as focal cases, we unpack the complexity, tensions, and possibilities that arise through collaborations driven by the objective to promote new and more just forms of science learning within public schools. In this article, we use three key dimensions of participatory design research (namely, critical historicity, power, and relationality) as analytical lenses through which to reflect upon school–university partnerships that we are in the beginning stages of forming. Through this methodology, we shed light on: (a) the historical genealogies of equity-oriented work and (b) the tensions that we encountered as we strived for beginning partnerships with K-12 schools. These narratives unveil the dynamic and contentious nature of forming school–university partnerships that always occurs within a sociopolitical landscape impacted by intersecting and powered identity markers, including those around race, gender, language, culture, and status. We provide specific recommendations for supporting education researchers who aspire to transform the learning of sciences at schools through a collaborative and sustainable partnership. These recommendations include ideas around how to collectively generate goals with schools centered on transformative science learning; attention to the role of language and race in shaping partnership role-remediation; and creating infrastructure for developing school–university partnerships toward transformative social changes, including financial, human and relational resources, as well as new forms of recognition systems. 

This study intends to identify leverage points to increase Latinx high school students’ identification with STEM careers. We used multi-group structural equation modeling to analyze science identity survey data (N=1295) focusing on differences across race/ethnicity. Although Latinx students on average reported lower science activities participation and perception of science than their White and Asian American peers, the indirect effects from participation in science activities at home, school, and out-of-school consistently held for all racial/ethnic groups. Our findings suggest: (a) the importance of increasing Latinx students’ participation in science activities at home, science classrooms, and out-of-school programs, and (b) the need to strategically design the activities, including school science curricula, in ways that increase Latinx students’ self-perception in and with science. 

With the urgent call for supporting science teachers to promote equity and justice through their daily work of teaching, there is a growing need for better understanding how science teachers come to engage in transformative teaching and learning that is equitably consequential. In this participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), we created a professional learning context in which high school chemistry teachers engaged in a pedagogical imagining (Gutiérrez & Calabese Barton, 2015) by leveraging their teaching experiences, knowledge about students and communities, values, and concerns to create powerful learning contexts for Latinx and multilingual students from immigrant, low-income families. Drawing upon the perspective of learning as making and sharing of the world interwoven with making and sharing of selves (Warren et al, 2020), we analyzed teachers’ participations and discourses to examine teachers’ making and sharing that were equitably consequential. The findings illustrated three critical moments of teachers’ making and sharing where: (a) the teachers collectively developed shared pedagogical goals toward transformative learning while formulating agency, (b) the teachers and the researchers came to design a creative stoichiometry unit where students use chemistry to make their community better, and (c) the teachers came to be committed to being ‘intentional’ in their relational work to create a welcoming and safe learning environment using concrete pedagogical strategies. The analyses point out three design features of the professional learning context that were associated with the teachers’ consequential makings: (a) the use of a conceptual tool (i.e., ‘design principles’), (b) the power of “what if” discourses, and (c) creating a space for collective learning. Recommendations for designing professional learning context toward transformative teaching and learning are discussed. 

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.