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Visualizing Chemistry Teachers’ Enacted Assessment Design Practices to Better Understand Barriers to “Best Practices”
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In this paper, the relationship between high school chemistry teachers’ self-generated “best practices” for developing formative assessments and the assessments they implement in their courses are examined…
Integrating a Statistical Topic Model and a Diagnostic Classification Model for Analyzing Items in a Mixed Format Assessment
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Selected response items and constructed response (CR) items are often found in the same test. Conventional psychometric models for these two types of items typically focus on using the scores for correctness of the…
Developing Transmedia Engineering Curricula Using Cognitive Tools to Impact Learning and the Development of STEM Identity
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This paper examines the use of Imaginative Education (IE) to create an NGSS-aligned middle school engineering curriculum that supports transfer and the development of STEM identity.
This paper examines…
How Science Teachers DiALoG Classrooms: Towards a Practical and Responsive Formative Assessment of Oral Argumentation
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This article presents lessons learned from an ongoing attempt to conceptualize, develop, and refine a way for teachers to gather formative assessment evidence about classroom argumentation as it happens…
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This study explores design strategies used by experienced designers in Energy3D, a computer-aided design (CAD) simulation environment designed for learning settings, to provide insight into supporting students' use of CAD…
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This web-based portal offers free, technology-enhanced science assessment tasks for Grades 3-5. Designed for use by educators, researchers, and the public, the tasks are aligned to the NGSS performance expectations and…
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DiALoG stands for Diagnosing the Argumentation Levels of Groups. It is designed for teachers to formatively assess the quality of evidence-based arguments and to guide the selection of instructional responses designed to…
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Assessment tasks intended to support teaching and learning in classrooms that are enacting NGSS-aligned instruction, and to gain insights into grades 3-8 students’ progress in building proficiency with NGSS performance…
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Estimating and monitoring the construct-irrelevant variance (CIV) is of significant importance to validity, especially for constructed response assessments with rich contextualized information. To examine CIV in…
Developing and Piloting a Tool to Assess Culturally Responsive Principles in Schools Serving Indigenous Students
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This article presents a tool and discusses the rationale for the authors’ development of a tool designed to assess the alignment of culturally responsive schooling principles within schools serving predominantly…
Articulating a Transformative Approach for Designing Tasks that Measure Young Learners’ Developing Proficiencies in Integrated Science and Literacy
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This paper introduces an approach for designing NGSS-aligned assessments that measure young learners’ science progress while also attending to the scientific language and literacy practices that are integral parts of the…
Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions of Assessment Tasks that Measure Content Knowledge for Teaching about Matter
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This study explores how 79 elementary preservice teachers perceive the relevance and importance of assessment task scenarios designed to elicit information about content knowledge for teaching (CKT) about matter and its…
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The purpose of this study was to investigate fourth-grade students’ sensemaking of a word problem. Sensemaking occurs when students connect their understanding of situations with existing knowledge. We investigated…
Examining the Responding Component of Teacher Noticing: A Case of One Teacher’s Pedagogical Responses to Students’ Thinking in Classroom Artifacts
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In this study, we investigated how an experienced fourth-grade teacher responded to her students’ thinking as part of her teacher noticing practice in a formative assessment context. Our primary purpose in doing this work…
Training a New Generation of Problem Solvers: How Can Education Programs Develop the Problem-Solving Skills of Today's Schoolchildren and Tomorrow's STEM Workforce?
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This article addresses the need and potential for students to develop problem-solving skills as part of STEM learning.
Songer, N.B. (2022 April) Training a new generation of problem solvers: How can…
When Should I Use a Measure to Support InstructionalImprovement at Scale? The Importance of Considering BothIntended and Actual Use in Validity Arguments
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Despite the ease of accessing a wide range of measures, little attention is given to validity arguments when considering whether to use the measure for a new purpose or in a different context. Making a validity argument…
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The process of using Learning Analytics (LA) to improve teaching works from the assumption that data should be readily shared between stakeholders in an educational organization. However, the design of LA tools often does…
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Formative assessment is an important component of teaching as it enables teachers to foster student learning by uncovering, interpreting, and advancing student thinking. In this work, we sought to characterize how…
Analyzing Chemistry Teachers’ Formative Assessment Practices Using Formative Assessment Portfolio Chapters
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The effective use of formative assessment (FA) has been demonstrated to confer positive impacts on student learning. To understand why and how FA works, it is necessary to characterize teachers’ FA practices, but because…
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Teaching chemistry as a practice rather than as a mere collection of facts demands that teachers modify their practices, particularly their approach to formative assessment (FA). In this study, we investigated how teachers…
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Teachers face challenges when building the concept of substance with students because tensions of meanings emerge from students’ daily life and canonical ideas developed in classrooms. A powerful tool to address learning,…
A Design-Based Process in Characterizing Experienced Teachers’ Formative Assessment Enactment in Science Classrooms
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Formative assessment can facilitate teachers’ abilities to elicit and notice the disciplinary substance of students’ thinking and to respond based on this. Following a design-based process, we developed principled…
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One challenge facing the fields of mathematics education and special education is how to design instruction on fraction concepts that can meet the needs of diverse learners. An innovation that shows promise is to base…
Validating the Use of Student-Level Instruments to Examine Preservice Teachers' Mathematical Problem Solving
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Problem solving is a central focus of mathematics teaching and learning. If teachers are expected to support students' problem-solving development, then it reasons that teachers should also be able to solve problems…
Examining How Using Dichotomous and Partial Credit Scoring Models Influence Sixth-Grade Mathematical Problem-Solving Assessment Outcomes
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Determining the most appropriate method of scoring an assessment is based on multiple factors, including the intended use of results, the assessment's purpose, and time constraints. Both the dichotomous and partial credit…
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This article introduces a new framework for articulating how educational assessments can be related to teacher uses in the classroom. It articulates three levels of assessment: macro (use of standardized tests), meso (…
Unpacking Response Process Issues Encountered When Developing a Mathematics Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) Assessment
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It is essential for items in assessments of mathematics’ teacher knowledge to evoke the desired response processes – to be interpreted and responded to by teachers as intended by item developers. In this study, we sought…
Standards-Aligned Instructional Supports to Promote Computer Science Teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge
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This position paper advocates supporting CS teacher professional learning by supplementing existing curriculum-specific teacher PD with standards-aligned PD that focuses on teachers' conceptual understanding of CS…
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K- 12 Computer Science (CS) education is developing rapidly but still lacks a comprehensive measure for CS teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). We respond to this need by describing the design of a CS-PCK…
Investigating the Presence of Mathematics and the Levels of Cognitively Demanding Mathematical Tasks in Integrated STEM Units
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Effective K-12 integrated STEM education should reflect an intentional effort to adequately represent and facilitate each of its component disciplines in a meaningful way. However, most research in this space has been…
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Review of the recent literature on integrated STEM curriculum development and implementation. Included are frameworks for integrated STEM curriculum development and research assessments to evaluate curriculum quality.…
Beyond the Design of Assessment Tasks: Expanding the Assessment Toolkit to Support Teachers’ Formative Assessment Practices in Elementary Science Classrooms
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Teachers experience challenges in effectively using formative assessment practices in their classrooms. In the US, only 28% of elementary teachers report using formative assessment. This study highlights the need to design…
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Involving students in scientific modeling practice is one of the most effective approaches to achieving the next generation science education learning goals. Given the complexity and multirepresentational features of…
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To best support students in developing competence, assessments that allow students to use knowledge to solve challenging problems and make sense of phenomena are needed. These assessments need to be designed and tested to…
Examining the Influence of COVID-19 on Elementary Mathematics Standardized Test Scores in a Rural Ohio School District
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In the United States, national and state standardized assessments have become a metric for measuring student learning and high-quality learning environments. As the COVID-19 pandemic offered a multitude of learning…
Flip It: An Exploratory (Versus Explanatory) Sequential Mixed Methods Design Using Delphi and Differential Item Functioning to Evaluate Item Bias
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The Delphi method has been adapted to inform item refinements in educational and psychological assessment development. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design using Delphi is a common approach to gain experts'…
Examining Elementary Science Teachers' Responses to Assessments Tasks Designed to Measure Their Content Knowledge for Teaching About Matter and its Interactions
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Despite the importance of developing elementary science teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), there are limited assessments that have been designed to measure the full breadth of their CKT at scale. Our overall…
Investigating Teachers’ Understanding Through Topic Modeling: A Promising Approach to Studying Teachers’ Knowledge
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Examining teachers’ knowledge on a large scale involves addressing substantial measurement and logistical issues; thus, existing teacher knowledge assessments have mainly consisted of selected-response items because of…
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This article pilots ChatGPT in tackling the most challenging part of science learning and found it successful in automation of assessment development, grading, learning guidance, and recommendation of learning materials…
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is prevalent in nearly every aspect of our lives. However, recent studies have found a significant amount of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding AI. To develop effective educational…
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This report takes stock of what we currently know as well as what we need to know to make classroom assessment maximally beneficial for the teaching and learning of STEM subject matter in K–12 classrooms…
Can Generative AI and ChatGPT Outperform Humans on Cognitive-Demanding Problem-Solving Tasks in Science?
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This study aimed to examine an assumption regarding whether generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools can overcome the cognitive intensity that humans suffer when solving problems. We examine the performance of…
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In this paper, we describe three challenges (conflict between multiple dimensions of science proficiency, authentic data, and grade-appropriate graphing tools) that we faced when designing for a specific Next Generation…
Reasoning About Data in Elementary School: Student Strategies and Strengths when Reasoning with Multiple Variables
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The need for data literacy is an increasingly pressing priority in society, but most of the work in data-centred education has focused on developing skills at the middle school, secondary, and post-secondary levels, with…
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This study applied the many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) to assess students’ knowledge-in-use in middle school physical science.
This study applied the many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) to assess…
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A School Science and Mathematics Journal editorial.
Bostic, J. (2023). Engaging hearts and minds in assessment research. School Science and Mathematics Journal, 123(6), 217-219. https://doi.org/10.1111/…
Developing and Using a Scalable Assessment to Measure Preservice Elementary Teachers' Ccontent Knowledge for Teaching About Matter
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There is strong agreement in science teacher education of the importance of teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), which includes their subject matter knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge. However,…
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In this report section, we discuss the importance of aligning classroom assessments with learning goals and instructional practices to both shape and evaluate students’ learning opportunities.
In this…
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Cognitive interviews play an important role in articulating the intended construct of educational assessments. This paper describes the iterative development of protocols for cognitive interviews with kindergarten through…
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This section presents an overview of critical developments in technology-driven, classroom-based innovative assessment practices. It uses a framework organized around cognitive constructs, assessment functionality, and…