Assessment

Graph technologies are now widely available in K-12 science and mathematics classrooms. These technologies have the potential to impact the learning of science and mathematics, especially by supporting student investigations. We use meta-analysis to analyze 42 design and comparison studies involving data from 7699 students spanning over 35 years. In these studies, graphing technologies include computer software such as simulations; online tools such as graph utilities; and sensors such as temperature probes. We characterize the assessments used to measure graphing.

High school chemistry teachers struggle to use assessment results to inform instruction. In the absence of expert assistance, teachers often look to their peers for guidance and support; however, little is known about the assessment beliefs and practices of high school chemistry teachers or the discourse mechanisms used as teachers support one another. Presented in this paper are the results from analyzing a discussion between five high school chemistry teachers as they generated a set of best practices for inquiry assessments.

Teachers' use of formative assessment (FA) has been shown to improve student outcomes; however, teachers enact FA in many ways. We examined classroom videos of nine experienced teachers of elementary, middle, and high school science, aiming to create a model of FA enactment that is useful to teachers.

Application of new automated scoring technologies, such as natural language processing and machine learning, makes it possible to provide automated feedback on students' short written responses. Even though many studies investigated the automated feedback in the computer-mediated learning environments, most of them focused on the multiple-choice items instead of the constructed response items. This study focuses on the latter and investigates a formative feedback system integrated into an online science curriculum module teaching climate change.

As teacher education shifts to focus on teaching beginners to do the work of teaching, assessments need to shift to focus on assessing practice. We focus on one teaching practice, eliciting student thinking, in the context of elementary mathematics. We describe assessments in two contexts (field and simulation). For each assessment, we describe the eliciting of three prospective teachers what could be seen about the skills of group of prospective teachers (N = 44).

As teacher education shifts to focus on teaching beginners to do the work of teaching, assessments need to shift to focus on assessing practice. We focus on one teaching practice, eliciting student thinking, in the context of elementary mathematics. We describe assessments in two contexts (field and simulation). For each assessment, we describe the eliciting of three prospective teachers what could be seen about the skills of group of prospective teachers (N = 44).

We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Given the power that assessments have in today’s education systems, our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students’ emergent reform-oriented science meaning-making in our project-designed assessments.

This paper illustrates how the combination of teacher and computer guidance can strengthen collaborative revision and identifies opportunities for teacher guidance in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. We took advantage of natural language processing tools embedded in an online, collaborative environment to automatically score student responses using human-designed knowledge integration rubrics. We used the automated explanation scores to assign adaptive guidance to the students and to provide real-time information to the teacher on students’ learning.

This paper illustrates how the combination of teacher and computer guidance can strengthen collaborative revision and identifies opportunities for teacher guidance in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. We took advantage of natural language processing tools embedded in an online, collaborative environment to automatically score student responses using human-designed knowledge integration rubrics. We used the automated explanation scores to assign adaptive guidance to the students and to provide real-time information to the teacher on students’ learning.

Test scoring procedures should align with the intended uses and interpretations of test results. In this paper, we examine three test scoring procedures for an operational assessment of early numeracy, the Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA). Current test specifications call for subscores to be reported for each of the eight subtests on the EGMA. This test scoring procedures has been criticized as being difficult for stakeholders to use and interpret, thereby impacting the overall usefulness of the EGMA for informing decisions.