Formative assessment research in science education focuses heavily on design, implementation, and validation, but does not elaborate on how teachers can and should use results of assessments to enhance their teaching practice. In order to do this, a detailed analysis of how teachers interpret their specific assessment results is required. An interview protocol was designed to elicit high school chemistry teachers' general assessment beliefs as well as their interpretations of their student outcomes from their original chemistry assessments and individual items therein. Using a closed-coding scheme based on the framework of Assessment as Scientific Inquiry (ASI), interviews were analyzed to determine teacher conclusions based on their assessment results, sources and reasons for conclusions made, and resulting actions with justifications. Findings show that teachers do not naturally provide reasons for all conclusions and sparingly give justifications for their actions resulting from interpretation of assessment data. Chemistry teachers also primarily use formative assessment for student evaluation as opposed to informing their own practice. In stoichiometry, teachers often focus on student understanding of the entire process of stoichiometry and only consider student errors in individual steps (mole ratio, mole conversions, balancing reactions) when prompted, most commonly leading to broad as opposed to specific remediations. Lastly, chemistry teachers often do not consider alternative reasons (beyond those implicit to the question being answered) for observed student performance on assessments. Results including teacher quotations and ASI analytic threads along with implications for future work will be presented.

Interpreting formative assessment to meaningfully guide chemistry teaching

246th National Meeting (2013)

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