Exploring alignment among learning progressions, teacher-designed formative assessment tasks, and student growth: Results of a four-year study

ABSTRACT

This article describes a 4-year study of experienced high school biology teachers’ participation in a five-step professional development experience in which they iteratively studied student ideas with the support of a set of learning progressions, designed formative assessment activities, practiced using those activities with their students, enacted the activities, and then reflected on next steps to guide their instruction. Drawing on classroom artifacts and student responses to a pre–post assessment, we examined the alignment of teacher-created formative assessment tasks with the learning progressions, as well as student learning relative to the progressions. A A partial-credit Model revealed that the majority of students' learning reflected learning from lower- to upper-anchors on multiple learning progressions. This finding suggests that, by participating in the professional learning experience, teachers were able to successfully support student learning of the content as represented in the majority of the learning progressions. Results are interpreted in light of learning progressions being used as scaffolds for formative assessment design and practice.

Funding

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0953375. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

¹ Although Elevate was conducted at three different high schools in the same district, organizational and personnel changes at one of those schools disrupted the professional environment during the course of the study, making it a non-comparable site with the other two schools (Heredia, 2015). As such, in this article, we report on the results from two schools.

² See Furtak et al. (2014) for more information on the DANS, and Alonzo and Steedle (2009) for a justification of similar ranges of alpha for ordered-multiple choice items with varying contexts.

³ An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) analysis using the pretest as the covariate revealed that the effect of year approached significance, F(_{3, 1725}) = 2.577, p = .052.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0953375. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.