Research On Informal Formative Assessment In Secondary Science Classrooms

Formative assessment is an educational process for student’s learning.As an important part of formative assessment,informal formative assessment can take place within continuous teacher-student interactions in the classroom.It is a discursive process of teacher’s eliciting information,student’s response,teacher’s recognizing information,and teacher’s using information immediately.Research shows that informal formative assessment has the most direct and effective influence on teacher’s teaching and students’ learning.Therefore,how to systematically explore and characterize the informal formative assessment enactment of teachers in China based on the research of classroom discourse and formative assessment has become an important topic.This study reviewed the historical origin of informal formative assessment.In the context of the generation and development of formative assessment,the shift of assessment goals from result to process,the expansion of formative assessment conception,and the promotion of grounded practical research,informal formative assessment has emerged and become an important research field of formative assessment.Then,this study explained the essence,structure,and function of informal formative assessment to analyze the core knowledge base.At the same time,this study further focused on the discourse structure,practice types,and influencing factors of informal formative assessment in order to present how informal formative assessment operates in the classroom context.Based on the above research,this study aimed to characterize the informal formative assessment enactment of teachers and explore various influence factors on informal formative assessment.Specifically,what is the discourse structure of teachers’ informal formative assessment? What are the main categories of teachers’ informal formative assessment practices? What factors affect teachers’ informal formative assessment enactment?To answer the above study questions,this study was designed as a case study to deeply describe and analyze secondary science teachers’ enactment of informal formative assessments based on 20 classroom videos and interviews.The main conclusions are as follows.First,this study found the basic characteristics of teachers’ informal formative assessment discourse structure.Specifically,the proportion of teachers’ effective informal formative assessment cycle was low.In terms of specific discourse strategies,teachers’ eliciting strategies had their own emphasis on conceptual or epistemic objectives.The revoice and clarifies were teachers’ most common strategies.However,teachers’ using strategies for student learning were various.In terms of discourse sequential analysis,teachers’ eliciting conceptual information with closed form was more likely to trigger students’ scientific ideas,and when teachers’ eliciting epistemic information with open-ended form was more likely to trigger students’ unscientific ideas;Regarding the responses to students’ different scientific ideas,teachers’ response types varied.When faced with students’ short scientific response,all teachers responded in a corroborative way.Second,from the teacher’s purpose of eliciting learning information and the function of responding to learning information,this study found that there were convergent and divergent informal formative assessment practices with six specific patterns for learning in teachers’ assessment practices.In the convergent informal formative assessment,the teachers mainly elicited conceptual knowledge in a convergent way to confirm the student’s ideas,added student’s ideas,and corrected the student’s ideas from teacher’s perspectives.In the divergent informal formative assessment,teachers mainly elicited epistemological knowledge in the divergent way to promote students to construct ideas,push students to improve their ideas,and encourage the arguments among students from student’s perspective.In addition,this study also found insufficient informal formative assessment that teachers did not respond to students’ opinions in a timely manner.Third,this study analyzed the possible factors from teachers and students’ perspectives that may influence informal formative assessment practices.At the teacher level,factors included teachers’ different learning beliefs,knowledge,understanding of student’s learning status,and personal teaching style.At the student level,factors included students’ low cognitive ability and expressive experience,negative emotion in participation,and worrying about making mistakes.At the external context level,factors included the teaching progress and class time constraints,democratic classroom culture with respecting students’ opinions,the dominance of test culture,the motivation of science curriculum assessment reform,and the lack of teacher development programs.In a word,teacher’s enactment of informal formative assessment was obviously affected by above factors.Finally,this study summarized the key conclusions and offered some suggestion to improve the practice of informal formative assessment.According to the reflection of the limitations,this study looked forward to the directions of informal formative assessment research in the future.