Portraits of Teachers' Enactments of Instructionally Informative Assessment Tasks

Event related reference resources:https://www.cite.hku.hk/events/_20220622_619_zaidi/20220622_slide.pdf

Chair: Prof. Nancy Law, Professor, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong

Portraits of Teachers’ Enactments of Instructionally Informative Assessment Tasks:
Examples from Middle and Elementary Grade Science Classrooms with Implications for Assessment Design and Practice

Decades of research have shown that formative use of classroom assessments can have a positive influence on student learning, providing in situ support for monitoring the learning of diverse groups of students. Unfortunately, teachers often do not feel well prepared to do so as highlighted by a recent U.S. national survey (2018) of science teachers. Given the promising impact of formative assessment practices on student learning and engagement, finding ways of supporting teachers in enacting these practices is important, especially given contemporary goals for science teaching and learning. In this talk I will highlight two necessary and complementary mechanisms to support such practice: (a) instructionally informative assessment tasks, and (2) examples of how formative assessment practices can be an integral part of high-quality instruction. Instructionally informative tasks and their formative use are essential but often implicit components of research-based frameworks for quality teaching and learning. In this talk, I will address these concerns by presenting portraits of teachers’ enactments of informative assessments for formative use in elementary and middle school science classrooms. The portraits showcase how teachers think about and use assessments as instructional activities to inform learning and teaching, as well as the essential properties of assessments that make this feasible. This work highlights various possibilities for integrating formative use of assessments with instruction and how assessing formatively could be imagined as part of teacher’s instructional practices. I will conclude this talk by offering implications of this conceptualization for research on supporting teachers’ assessment practices together with design and use of instructionally informative assessments.