Students often answer chemistry questions in a variety of ways, and teachers need to be able to notice and interpret the different ways of thinking underneath their answers. Understanding student thinking can be difficult to do in only written work, but teacher-student and student - student discourse can illuminate thinking as it is occuring. To understand how students may be thinking, teachers can design and use formative assessment (FA) probes, which offer students rich tasks to think and engage in discourse. Our research team investigates the diverse ways chemistry teachers use FA in their classrooms, including eliciting student thinking, noticing the chemistry substance, interpreting how students make sense of the ideas they discuss, and acting on this to further support student learning. As a team of chemistry education researchers and chemistry teachers, we are designing and implementing a professional development program around FA to support chemistry teachers to adopt more interpretive orientations, nurture students' chemical thinking, and transform teaching. Within the research aspect of this project, we characterized teachers' FA practices with teacher - perspective video data collected as teachers used FA in their classrooms. Two video clips (2-5 minutes) from each of 9 teachers' recording sessions were analyzed in which both students' thinking and teachers' interactions with students were observable. Three streams of data were triangulated: (1) pre - and post - self interviews by teachers explaining their intentions for the FA and what they learned about students' thinking, (2) the teachers' annotations on their videos indicating reasons behind each teaching move, and (3) our analysis inferring the noticing and interpreting by the teachers, and their elicitation and advancing of student thinking in their teaching moves. We then used this coding framewrok to help teachers understand the possible range of actions that they can take based on what they notice and interpret in students' chemical thinking.

Characterizing teachers approaches in formative assessment in chemistry classrooms

255th National Meeting (2018)

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