Road Maps for Learning: A Guide to the Navigation of Learning Progressions

Abstract

The overall aim of this article is to analyze the relationships between the roles of assessment in pedagogy, the interactions between curriculum assessment and pedagogy, and the study of pupils' progression in learning. It is argued that well-grounded evidence of pupils' progressions in learning is crucial to the work of teachers, so that a method is needed which will enable the production of such evidence in relation to the learning strategy of any teacher. The argument starts by proposing a rationale for understanding the central roles of assessments in pedagogy and in particular the relationships between their use for formative and summative purposes. This is then related to a more general discussion of the links between curriculum, assessment and pedagogy which serves to highlight the importance of models of progression. The next step is to consider how assessment evidence of pupils' learning can be analyzed in two ways: By ordering the respondents in terms of overall scores, and by ordering individual items in terms of their difficulty. A method of relating these two in the BEAR assessment system is then explained. This method is then illustrated by a general review of the literature on the study of the atomic-molecular model, leading to detailed consideration of progression in the understanding of melting and evaporation. Results obtained, from a test of eleven items about these two topics, attempted by 665 grade 8 pupils in 11 schools in San Francisco, are then used to illustrate the method of analysis and the nature of the results that it can produce. A final section considers the educational and assessment issues about learning progressions, pedagogy and assessment that we see as being informed by the ideas and practices outlined in the article.

Keywords:

• curriculum
• pedagogy
• assessment
• formative
• summative
• progression
• Wright map
• molecular model
• changes of state

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is jointly authored; authors' names are listed in alphabetical order. We would like to note that we are indebted to the authors of Smith, Wiser, Anderson & Krajcik (2006) for laying out the initial version of the learning progression for our own work in this article.

Notes

¹Throughout this article we have used the term “student” and “pupil” as if they were equlvalent, i.e., no significant difference is implied by the use of one rather than the other.

²Different authors distinguish between pedagogy and instruction in different ways. In what follows we shall treat the two terms as synonymous with both denoting comprehensive overviews of the design and execution of classroom teaching and its assessment.

³Another problem is that in the understanding of some teachers, and of many publishers, formative assessment is equated to frequent testing and not seen to be at the core of the learning process—a problem that may arise because of a narrow understanding of the term assessment (see, for example, Klenowski, 2009). Our discussions here will show that this is a serious misunderstanding.

⁴A culture of competition is closely related to a norm-referenced perspective in assessment. In such a perspective, the overall performance of a group cannot improve, and the successful progress of some must lead to apparent regress of others whose achievement has not, objectively, changed. A criterion-referenced approach doesn't necessarily entail either of these consequences.

⁵In this diagram, and throughout this article, progression will be envisioned as proceeding from the bottom to the top of any relevant diagram or table.

FIGURE 3 Outline of road map for molecular theory of matter.

⁶The research studies used in this section are summarized in Appendix A.

⁷Note that the term progress variable is also used in the literature (e.g., Masters, Adams & Wilson, 1990; Masters & Forster, 1996)—the distinction between this term and construct map is that progress variable would be used to refer to the result of applying all four of the building blocks.

⁸The term construct map is the equivalent in the BAS of the “road map” that we have described above. Effectively, a construct map is one particular type of a road map (the one that belongs with the BAS). Hence, we will use construct map in the text regarding the BAS, and return to using the generic term road map in the section Discussion and Conclusion.

⁹The full set of scoring guides for the 11 items is shown in Appendix B.

¹⁰Note that this relationship between the multiple-choice part of item 226 (226MC) and the open-ended part of item 226 (226OE) is not analogous to the multiple-choice and open-ended parts of items 219 and 225 (see Appendix B).

¹¹The reliabilities of the Melting and ESB item sets were found to be 0.73 and 0.75, respectively.

¹²The metrics of these two dimensions have been aligned using a dimension-aligning technique (Yao, 2010).