Elsevier

Teaching and Teacher Education

Volume 76, November 2018, Pages 267-282
Teaching and Teacher Education

Developing knowledge-in-action with a learning progression: Sequential analysis of teachers' questions and responses to student ideas

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2018.06.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • •

    We examined teachers’ questions and responses to student ideas through sequential analysis over a four-year study.

  • •

    There was a strong connection between open-ended questions and students’ scientific ideas.

  • •

    Teachers became more likely to respond to students' ideas from learning progressions with high-quality feedback.

Abstract

Researchers have argued that teachers' knowledge can be evidenced by the ways they elicit and respond to student ideas. We analyze data from a four-year study of nine high school teachers who designed formative assessment tasks and learned about student thinking with a learning progression for natural selection. We coded teacher questions, student responses, and teacher feedback in classroom videos collected across four years. Through sequential analysis, we found that teachers came to ask more questions that elicited student ideas, and also became more likely to respond to student ideas with pushing feedback at the end of the study.

Section snippets

Teachers' knowledge-in-action

Shulman (1986) proposed a foundational model for types of teacher knowledge consisting of content knowledge, or a teacher's knowledge of the discipline; their pedagogical knowledge, or understanding of generic teaching strategies; and their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), or their understanding of how student understanding develops in a domain, and teaching strategies for helping students to learn ideas in that domain. This framework has been unpacked as it applies to pedagogical knowledge

Study design

We analyze data from the Elevate project, a study of teacher participation in a long-term professional learning experience focused on formative assessment task design and enactment (see Furtak et al., 2016). We followed a cohort of nine biology teachers working at three high schools for four years, including a baseline year in which we collected data to establish a comparison point for teachers' classroom practices prior to the study intervention. Teachers then participated in an on-site,

Results

We present our results according to the research questions guiding the study.

Discussion

In this paper, we set forth to determine the ways in which teachers' attention to student ideas shifted as they participated in a three-year professional learning experience designed to support their understanding of student ideas about natural selection. By aggregating classroom video collected from nine teachers, we were able to examine the way teachers drew on this knowledge in classroom conversations to identify patterns in the types of questions teachers asked, and the responses they

Author Note

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0953375. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

References (84)

  • D.L. Ball

    Prospective elementary and secondary teachers' understanding of division

    Journal for Research in Mathematics Education

    (1990)
  • M. Beisiegel et al.

    The design of video-based professional development: An exploratory experiment intended to identify effective features

    Journal of Teacher Education

    (2018)
  • R.E. Bennett

    Formative assessment: A critical review

    Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice

    (2011)
  • A. Berry et al.

    Analysing science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge: A report on the second PCK summit

  • P. Black et al.

    Assessment and classroom learning

    Assessment in Education

    (1998)
  • Board on Science Education

    A framework for K-12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas

    (2012)
  • J. Bruner

    The process of education

    (1960)
  • T.P. Carpenter et al.

    Cognitively guided instruction: A knowledge base for reform in primary mathematics instruction

    The Elementary School Journal

    (1996)
  • K. Catley et al.

    Tracing a prospective learning progression for developing understanding of evolution

  • C.B. Cazden

    Classroom discourse: The language of learning and teaching

    (2001)
  • J.E. Coffey et al.

    The missing disciplinary substance of formative assessment

    Journal of Research in Science Teaching

    (2011)
  • T. Corcoran et al.

    Learning progressions in science: An evidence-based approach to reform

    (2009)
  • J.H. van Driel et al.

    Teacher professional development focusing on pedagogical content knowledge

    Educational Researcher

    (2012)
  • R.A. Duschl et al.

    Strategies and challenges to changing the focus of assessment and instruction in science classrooms

    Educational Assessment

    (1997)
  • R. Duschl et al.

    Learning progressions and teaching sequences: A review and analysis

    Studies in Science Education

    (2011)
  • R.A. Engle et al.

    Guiding principles for fostering productive disciplinary engagement: Explaining an emergent argument in a community of learners classroom

    Cognition and Instruction

    (2002)
  • E.A. van Es

    Participants' roles in the context of a video club

    The Journal of the Learning Sciences

    (2009)
  • M. Filsecker et al.

    Repositioning formative assessment from an educational assessment perspective: A response to Dunn & Mulvenon (2009)

    Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation

    (2012)
  • E.M. Furtak

    Linking a learning progression for natural selection to teachers’ enactment of formative assessment

    Journal of Research in Science Teaching

    (2012)
  • E.M. Furtak et al.

    Teachers’ formative assessment abilities and their relationship to student learning: Findings from a four-year intervention study

    Instructional Science

    (2016)
  • E.M. Furtak et al.

    A conceptual analysis of the conceptual inventory of natural selection: Improving diagnostic utility through within-item analysis

  • E.M. Furtak et al.

    Investigating the link between learning progressions and classroom assessment

    Science Education

    (2014)
  • E.M. Furtak et al.

    Exploring the Utility of Sequential Analysis in Studying Informal Formative Assessment Practices

    Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice

    (2017)
  • K. Garvin-Doxas et al.

    Understanding randomness and its impact on student learning: Lessons learned from building the biology concept inventory (BCI)

    Life Sciences Education

    (2008)
  • J. Gess-Newsome et al.

    Teacher pedagogical content knowledge, practice, and student achievement

    International Journal of Science Education

    (2017)
  • C. Goodwin

    Professional vision

    American Anthropologist

    (1994)
  • J.M. Gottman et al.

    Sequential analysis: A guide for behavioral researchers

    (1990)
  • A.W. Gotwals et al.

    Reasoning up and down a food chain: Using an assessment framework to investigate students' middle knowledge

    Science Education

    (2010)
  • K.L. Gunckel

    Teacher knowledge for using learning progressions in classroom instruction and assessment

    (2013)
  • J. Hattie et al.

    The power of feedback

    Review of Educational Research

    (2007)
  • M. Heritage et al.

    Scaling-up language learning progressions to support formative assessment: Lessons learned from a case study implementation

    (2015)
  • M. Heritage et al.

    From evidence to action: A seamless process in formative assessment?

    Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice

    (2009)

    • Cited by (19)

    • Learning progressions: affordances, critiques, and pathways toward equity

      2022, International Encyclopedia of Education: Fourth Edition

    • The quality of teacher feedback matters: Examining Chinese teachers’ use of feedback strategies in preschool math lessons

      2021, Teaching and Teacher Education
      Citation Excerpt :

      For most of the time, teachers purely recognized and specifically pointed out children’s right answers. This finding extends what have been found in elementary, secondary or high school mathematics classrooms, i.e., teacher mostly tended to let students know what was the right answer, with little intention to expand their understanding of related math concepts and their current math learning (Bature & Atweh, 2020; Furtak et al., 2018; Park et al., 2020), into early childhood math classrooms. In detail, teachers showed infrequent use of Expansion or Clarification strategies, but demonstrated frequent use of Recognizing children’s former math answers, with specifically pointing out what was correct or erroneous about children’s answer.

    • Linking teachers’ professional knowledge and teachers’ actions: Judgment processes, judgments and training

      2018, Teaching and Teacher Education

    • How to help students learn: An investigation of how in- and pre-service physics teachers respond to students' explanations

      2024, Physical Review Physics Education Research

    • Assessment Literacy in a Better Assessment Future

      2023, Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics

    • Teacher Evaluation in Primary and Secondary Schools: A Systematic Review of SSCI Journal Publications from 2012 to 2022

      2023, Sustainability (Switzerland)
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text
    © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.