Chapter 2 Connecting FACTs to Instruction and Learning
I taught a great lesson but the wrong class came.
—Anonymous
Integrating Assessment and Instruction
Formative assessment classroom techniques (FACTs) are rooted in good teaching practice. They offer a variety of ways to seamlessly integrate assessment and instruction that help teachers learn more about what students need to be successful learners of science. Teachers who use FACTs start their lessons where their students’ ideas are, identifying, charting, and monitoring learning paths that will eventually lead students to discover, understand, and use the important ideas and practices of science. Adapting teaching to reflect the emerging research on formative assessment and how students learn has a reciprocal effect on teaching and learning. As teachers incorporate more FACTs into their teaching practice, their understanding of student learning increases, which in turn improves the quality of their teaching and raises student achievement.
Consider how one first-grade teacher who studied her own assessment practices reflected on the link between assessment and her teaching:
Assessment is best if embedded within instruction. Authentic assessment does not aim to assign a child a grade but to determine what children know and where to go next . . . I need to embed more assessment tools within the curriculum. I need to also consider a variety of assessment tools to make certain that I am actually assessing science knowledge and not another curriculum area such as writing. I need to choose tools that allow students comfort to reveal their knowledge of science. (Cox-Peterson & Olson, 2002, p. 106)
The above reflection clearly notes the need to select the right tool or technique for the right instructional purpose. With 75 FACTs described in Chapter 4 to choose from, it is important to keep in mind that FACTs are not intended to be used as strategies picked at random. To be effectively integrated into one’s teaching practice, FACTs must be thoughtfully selected to match the appropriate stage and purpose of instruction.
The teacher’s reflection in the above quote indicates that the purpose of formative assessment is to guide teaching rather than assign a grade to students. While some of the FACTs described in Chapter 4 can be graded for summative purposes, their primary purpose is to inform and guide teaching and learning. This requires the teacher to shift instructional approaches from the “deliverer of content” and “assigner of grades” to careful gatherer and analyzer of student thinking and learning data that provide the teacher with information that can be used to make the content of a lesson more accessible to learners. This requires teachers to keep their fingers on the pulse of student learning by constantly being aware of, supporting, and monitoring students’ questions, comments, ideas, feedback, and reflections. When used throughout a cycle of instruction, formative assessment helps build the type of deeper conceptual knowledge that leads to enduring understanding.
Assessment That Promotes Thinking and Learning
Formative assessment enhances the daily interactions between students and between students and teachers by providing varied opportunities to surface, examine, work through, revise, apply, and reflect on scientific ideas. While FACTs provide valuable information to the teacher to use for making instructional decisions, they also activate, encourage, and deepen student thinking. Students use their existing ideas and build on them to understand and explain everyday objects, processes, and phenomena. FACTs encourage the use of critical thinking skills such as predicting, hypothesizing, using analogies, evaluating evidence, asking questions, and justifying ideas. Through the act of thinking about their ideas that surface through formative assessment, students actively engage in the process of constructing, modifying, or deepening their knowledge. Therefore, assessment not only serves the purpose of finding out what students are learning but also promotes learning.
Metacognition is a key component of assessment that promotes learning. Metacognition involves thinking about one’s thinking, including knowledge about one’s self as a processor of concepts and ideas. Figure 2.1 lists several indicators of metacognition.
Appropriate kinds of self-monitoring through metacognitive techniques and reflection have been demonstrated to support learning with understanding in a variety of areas. Helping students become more metacognitive about their own thinking and learning is closely tied to instructional practices that encourage feedback and self-assessment. However, it is important to point out that responding to feedback provided by the teacher or other students is different from students’ actively seeking feedback from the teacher or other students to assess their current thinking and level of understanding (Donovan & Bransford, 2005).
Providing support for metacognition and peer and self-assessment is an important use of several of the FACTs described in Chapter 4. FACTs can provide opportunities for students to analyze and evaluate their own ideas and the ideas of their peers. Awareness of one’s thinking includes knowing when new knowledge relates to or challenges what one already knows or believes and leads to questions that stimulate further inquiry. Opportunities to test out ideas after making predictions or claims confront students with the challenge of deciding if their ideas need to be revised, based on evidence from their new observations. Small group and class discussions provide a forum for students to express their ideas, make their thinking visible to themselves and others, engage in scientific argumentation, and explore ideas that seem to make the most sense. Graphic organizers help students organize their thinking.
Figure 2.1 Indicators of Metacognition
To be effective in promoting thinking and learning, metacognitive and reflection strategies should be explicitly taught and used in the science classroom. FACTs that incorporate these strategies should be taught in the context of the content students are learning. Teaching FACTs apart from the content of a lesson is like teaching science process skills separate from authentic content-based science inquiry.
Research shows clearly that “the most effective learners are self-regulating” and that helping students become more aware of their own learning raises their performance (Butler & Winne, 1995, p. 245). Not only do these skills need to be taught to students, but they are also useful only if students are motivated to use them (Wiliam, 2011). Therefore, FACTs and motivation to use them go hand in hand. Because several of the FACTs in this book are intrinsically engaging to students, and help them see the value of self-monitoring, you are apt to see motivation to learn increase when you effectively incorporate FACTs into your instruction.
Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning: The Science Assessment, Instruction, and Learning (SAIL) Cycle
A continuous assessment, instruction, and learning cycle model for science that can be used with the FACTs in Chapter 4 is the science assessment, instruction, and learning (SAIL) cycle shown in Figure 2.2. This instructional model can help guide science teachers in selecting an appropriate FACT to match the purpose and stage in the instructional or learning process and reinforces the inextricable link between assessment, instruction, and learning. The circular diagram illustrates the cyclic nature of the SAIL cycle, while instruction can loop back and repeat different stages as needed. Self-assessment and reflection are the centerpiece that promotes metacognition and is connected to each stage in the cycle.
In the early 1960s, J. Myron Atkin and Robert Karplus formulated a constructivist instructional model of guided discovery designed to be similar to the way scientists invent and use new concepts to explain the natural world. This instructional model, called the learning cycle, was designed to allow students an opportunity to surface and examine their prior conceptions. Once ideas are revealed, students have an opportunity to explore their ideas, arguing about and testing them in the process. When students see that their existing ideas do not fully match their findings, a disequilibrium results that opens the door to the construction of new scientific ideas. When students reach the stage where they develop the formal scientific understandings and patterns of reasoning that help them make sense of phenomena, they are encouraged to extend their learning and apply their ideas to a new situation or context.
Figure 2.2 The Science Assessment, Instruction, and Learning (SAIL) Cycle
Throughout the various stages of a learning cycle, teachers design and monitor instruction so that students become increasingly conscious of their own and others’ ideas. They gain confidence in their ability to learn, apply concepts to new situations, and construct evidence-based arguments (Lawson, 2002). Teachers orchestrate student learning in different ways at different stages, encouraging a classroom climate where ideas are openly generated and sufficient time is allowed for sense making and construction of new knowledge. All the while they are facilitating students’ construction of new ideas, teachers are formatively assessing by monitoring students’ changing conceptions and adapting their teaching and assessment techniques to match their students’ needs.
The original Karplus learning cycle has undergone several adaptations, including the popular 5E model (Bybee, 1997), the conceptual change model (CCM) (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982; Stepans, 2003), and the SAIL cycle described in this book. Figure 2.3 shows the similarities between the various stages of these three adaptations of the Karplus learning cycle.
Stages in the SAIL Cycle
The FACTs described in Chapter 4 can be used with any instructional model, including the 5E and CCM models. The advantage to linking the FACTs to the SAIL cycle is that it helps provide a framework for seamlessly integrating assessment, teaching, and learning. Each of the stages in the SAIL cycle has an explicit purpose connected to assessment, instruction, and learning, as shown in Figure 2.4 and described below. Figure 2.5 shows the different types of assessment used in each stage of the cycle.
Engagement and Readiness
FACTs can provide an opportunity to activate student thinking, develop curiosity, and stimulate interest in the content of a lesson. One widely accepted role of any teacher is that of student motivator (Osborne & Freyberg, 1985). Several of the FACTs involve interesting situations that capture students’ attention and trigger their thinking. Most students come to school ready to learn but with different social, cultural, educational, and real-life experiences. Various FACTs can reveal information about students’ diverse backgrounds that affect their readiness to learn. The information is used by the teacher to determine supports and provisions that may be necessary to help students succeed in their classroom learning environment. Examples from Chapter 4: Familiar Phenomenon Probes, Interest Scale, or Learning Goals Inventory.
Eliciting Prior Knowledge
Drawing out the initial ideas students have developed through their prior experiences, intuition, and encounters with familiar phenomena provides a starting point from which the teacher can design instruction that will build from students’ ideas. Probing students’ thinking allows teachers to determine where and how ideas may have developed and inform the types of instructional experiences that can build a bridge between where the students are in their understanding and the scientific view of the content they are learning. Elicitation strategies promote thinking by safely surfacing ideas in a nonjudgmental way. Discussion that accompanies elicitation allows students to share their thinking with others, which further challenges students’ thinking as they evaluate their peers’ explanations and arguments. Examples from Chapter 4: Friendly Talk Probes, Commit and Toss, or Card Sorts.
Exploration and Discovery
The exploration and discovery stage can involve direct experience with physical objects or processes, obtaining information and citing evidence from text, or uncovering ideas in discussion with peers. This stage can include FACTs that ask students to make predictions or claims that initiate scientific inquiry through investigation. Providing opportunities to justify and then test or gather information related to disciplinary core ideas gives students an opportunity to use evidence to support or change their initial ideas. This period of exploration and discovery allows the teacher to determine the kinds of understandings and questions students have before developing more structured opportunities for formalizing learning. During this stage, FACTs can also reveal how well students are responding to the activities, considering ideas of others, and whether their original ideas have been challenged based on the evidence gathered during their exploratory experiences. Assessment during this stage gives students a chance to share their developing ideas in a nonjudgmental environment for feedback from the teacher and peers. Selected FACTs expose students to others’ ideas and thereby help them refine or revise their own thinking, which subsequently informs instruction when shared with the teacher. Examples from Chapter 4: A&D Statements, P-E-O Probes, or Concept Card Mapping.
Concept and Skill Development
Assessment of conceptual understanding and use of skills, including the scientific and engineering practices during sense making, clarification, and development of formal concepts and processes, helps both reinforce the learning for students and uncover any difficulties in understanding or gaps that might still exist. FACTs used during this stage help teachers determine the extent to which students have grasped a concept, recognized relationships among ideas, included appropriate terminology, or successfully used a scientific or engineering practice. Results inform instruction by identifying the need for additional learning experiences and opportunities to build more solid understandings of content, indicating readiness to introduce formal terminology, demonstrating ability to use specific skills and scientific and engineering practices, or signaling that students are ready to transfer their newly formed ideas to a new context. In addition, teacher-to-student and student-to-student feedback further enhances opportunities to build and solidify conceptual understanding and utilize the scientific and engineering practices. Examples from Chapter 4: Refutations, Scientists’ Ideas Comparison, or Odd One Out.
Concept and Skill Transfer
Assessment information at this stage is used by the teacher to address impediments that may interfere with transferring learning to a new context or introduce new, related concepts that will build more sophisticated understandings. Assessment information is used to modify learning opportunities so that students can use their newly formed or modified ideas in a new situation or novel context. Assessment opportunities provide students with a new opportunity to demonstrate how they can apply their knowledge, skills, and scientific and engineering practices. Examples from Chapter 4: Justified List, Thought Experiments, or Recognizing Exceptions.
Self-Assessment and Reflection
Encouraging self-assessment and reflection supports students in developing important metacognitive skills that help them monitor their own thinking and learning. Students learn to think about learning as well as think about thinking. The distinction here is that self-assessment helps students think about whether the content makes sense. Reflection helps them think about how they make sense of the content. Students’ self-assessments and reflections provide valuable feedback to the teacher to inform how students’ ideas have changed or deepened over the course of instruction, students’ self-awareness of their learning, and the need to further differentiate instruction for certain students who may still be struggling conceptually. Reflections on learning activities can be used by the teacher to improve an instructional unit or lesson for future classes or inform ways to resurface difficult concepts in subsequent related lessons. Examples from Chapter 4: First Word–Last Word, I Used to Think . . . But Now I Know, or Muddiest Point.
Selecting and Using FACTs to Strengthen the Link Between Assessment, Instruction, and Learning
Selecting a FACT that informs teaching and promotes learning is a first step in using assessment for teaching and learning. The following is a list of suggestions for using FACTs to strengthen the link between assessment, instruction, and learning.
1. Think like a diagnostician. Since students’ preconceptions have such a powerful influence on their learning, teachers need to continually devise ways to ascertain students’ ideas in such a way that it becomes second nature to the teacher (Osborne & Freyberg, 1985). Teachers need to take advantage of every opportunity in both individual, small group, and whole-class settings to elicit initial ideas and analyze students’ thinking. See the Appendix for resources for supporting diagnostic learning environments in science.
2. Make students’ thinking explicit during scientific inquiry. Use FACTs to draw out students’ thinking before and throughout inquiry-based activities. Encourage students to commit to a prediction, claim, or outcome, supported by evidence from prior knowledge and experiences, to construct their explanations before testing their ideas. After committing to a justified prediction, claim, or outcome, students test their ideas and compare their observations with their initial ideas. When the evidence from observation does not support their original thinking, the dissonance that results is the pivotal point in encouraging students to seek further information and engage in sense-making processes that may help them give up their former ideas to accommodate new ones.
3. Create a classroom culture of ideas, not right answers. Use the FACTs to encourage students to share their ideas, regardless of whether they are right or wrong. Many students have been raised in a classroom culture where they are expected to give the “right answer.” Thus they hesitate to share their own ideas when they think they may be “wrong.” Hold off on telling students whether they are “right or wrong” and provide time for them to work through their ideas, weighing various viewpoints and evidence, until they are ready to construct a new understanding. The emphasis on testing or discussing ideas and revising one’s original explanations should take precedence over getting the right answer. Getting all ideas out on the table, before explaining the correct science, first may be frustrating and take longer, but in the long run, it will develop confidence in reasoning abilities as well as deeper, enduring understandings. In addition, students will be less apt to revert back to their original conceptions after the concept is fully developed and the lesson or unit of instruction ends.
4. Develop a discourse community. One of the key features of several of the FACTs described in Chapter 4 is the way they promote learning through discussion and argumentation. When students are talking about and defending their science ideas, whether in a whole-class discussion, in small groups, or in pairs, they are using the language of science as well as language that has meaning to them. “Talking the talk is an important part of learning” (Black & Harrison, 2004, p. 4). FACTs that encourage “productive science talk” not only engage students in activating their own thinking but also provide examples of others’ thinking for students to consider. See the Appendix for additional information on supporting productive science talk.
5. Encourage students to take risks. Create a safe environment where it is acceptable to share an idea without fear of being corrected by or embarrassed in front of the teacher or other students. Students will often hesitate to participate in discussions for fear of being judged negatively by their peers. Create norms of collaboration and discussion in the classroom so that everyone’s ideas are respected and acknowledged and it is safe to take risks.
6. Encourage students to listen carefully. In a formative assessment classroom, different ideas are surfaced and discussed among pairs of students, small groups, and the whole class. Students need to learn to listen carefully to others’ ideas and weigh the evidence that may lead to changing their own ideas. They need to learn not to accept a claim or idea just because their peers think it is correct. They need to learn how to examine all sides of an argument, including evidence from investigation and other relevant information sources, before accepting others’ ideas or changing a previously held one of their own. Formative assessment encourages students to think rather than just accept ideas as they are presented.
7. Use a variety of FACTs in a variety of ways. Although many of the features of effective formative assessment can now be identified, there is no single, simple recipe that teachers can adopt and follow (National Research Council, 2001). Even though FACTs differ from each other in many of the details, a variety of approaches to using formative assessment leads to greater likelihood of success in improving learning. Try out different types of FACTs to promote thinking and learning and inform teaching. Vary the ways they are used—through writing, drawing, or speaking. Vary strategies for sharing responses. For example, students can form groups based on similar thinking then jigsaw with other groups to share and consider alternative explanations. Responses can also be shared anonymously by the teacher, building confidence within the class to discuss and evaluate different explanations without identifying individuals.
8. Use a variety of grouping configurations. Social interaction plays a powerful part in motivation and the effectiveness of learning. Many of the FACTs in this book emphasize the social and community aspects of learning. The social interactions involved when FACTs are used in pairs, small groups, or whole-class discussion and argument are important for developing and deepening shared understandings. FACTs can provide a context and focal point for the discussion and argumentation that occur between students. Having to provide justification for one’s ideas to a partner or others in a group develops deeper understanding in both the justifier and the students engaged in analyzing the justification.
9. Encourage continuous reflection. Encourage students to reflect back on their initial ideas to note their own evidence of conceptual change or identify areas where they are still struggling with an idea. Understanding is an evolving process. It takes time for students to move toward the accepted scientific explanation, and students need to understand that there are many steps along the way. Being aware of their own thinking (metacognition) and knowing the learning goal they are striving toward will help students be more accountable for their own learning. Revisiting their initial response to a FACT and comparing it to where they are in their current understanding is a powerful way to recognize and reinforce learning.
Feedback from teachers who have used FACTs to link assessment, instruction, and learning has been overwhelmingly positive. The use of FACTs has considerably elevated teachers’ expectations of themselves and their students. The research on the effectiveness of formative assessment in improving learning has been confirmed for teachers through their own empirical observations as they see evidence of their students becoming more engaged and metacognitive in science, increasing their confidence in their ideas, using higher level thinking and response skills, constructing evidence-based scientific explanations, and valuing feedback and reflection. One teacher shared her surprise when her students begged her to use more assessment probes in her science lessons. Her comment— “I can’t believe my students were asking for more assessments! They even talk about the assessment probes on their way out the door and continue arguing about their ideas in the hallway”—is indicative of the power of formative assessment on increasing student engagement and eagerness to be learners of science.
All the ingredients are here for you to pay more attention to assessment in the context of effective teaching and learning rather than being distracted by the cloud of coverage and accountability. While coverage and accountability are important, they are achieved appropriately when teachers are truly accountable to students’ learning needs and use formative assessment data to continuously inform their teaching so that students will have the knowledge and skills to perform well on summative assessments. When student achievement scores improve and long-term retention and understanding replace the short-term memorization for standardized testing, then you will know you have successfully linked assessment, instruction, and learning!