Heuristics diagrams as a tool to formatively assess teachers’ research

Abstract

Many teacher education programs include different forms of teachers doing research. Be it in the form of action research or general inquiries about their practice, it has been argued that when teachers do research on their own practice, they are able to take a more reflective stance towards their work which is necessary to bring about educational change. However, it is hard to find tools that can be used to provide clear feedback in developing such research. In this paper, we present the results of using a heuristic tool called ‘heuristic diagram’ (HD), previously designed by the authors and based on Gowin’s heuristic Vee, to formatively assess in-service teachers’ research skills. Two different groups of science and mathematics in-service teachers in a Research Methods Course completed four different HD about their research project throughout the semester. We performed a general analysis based on a scoring rubric of these HD in order to show how teachers’ research skills were developed throughout the course. Teachers also evaluated their experience of using the HD through a semantic differential analysis and answered an open questionnaire about the advantages and difficulties of using such tool. Overall, the HD seems to be useful to formatively assess research skills because it allows teachers to make their theoretical framework explicit, relate it to the research question and to the methods used to answer it in an integrated and short way.

Keywords:

• In-service teacher education
• teacher researchers
• research skills