Aspire-II - From Teacher Task Design to Generalizable Knowledge of Student Learning: A Comprehensive Study of Learning Progression Use

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The EHR Core Research program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that will generate foundational knowledge in the field. While learning progressions have shown promise as supports for teachers as they design formative assessments, as well as suggested new approaches for modeling student learning, the field is still only at the beginning stages of understanding how learning progressions can inform and enhance student learning. This research is needed because studies show that although formative assessment may support student learning, formative assessment practices are not easy for teachers to learn. Through this effort up to 72 high school biology, chemistry and physics teachers will participate in professional learning communities to help them become more effective in using learning progression-centered formative assessment in their classrooms. This project will build on prior studies by helping teachers in setting learning goals, measuring student progress toward those goals, and providing feedback to improve students' performance. It will also extend an ongoing research-practice partnership between a university-based educational research team and a school district that are both committed to improving science education for its population of socioeconomically, linguistically, and ethnically diverse students.The overarching goals will be to investigate how teachers: (1) Engage with different types of learning progressions in different content domains to inform formative assessment design in professional learning communities; (2) Enact learning progression-based formative assessment tasks with students; (3) Measure the effect of learning progression-centered professional development on student learning, as well as the mediators of this effect; and will also (4) Model student learning and the extent to which assessment results support the hypotheses represented in learning progressions. The study will employ complementary qualitative and quantitative methods and follow a year of design-based implementation research with a quasi-experimental study of teachers participating in research-team facilitated professional learning communities focused on learning progressions. Evidence pertaining to teacher professional learning will be gathered through the triangulation of data from front-to-back analyses of teacher participation in professional learning communities, structured interviews, classroom observations, and analysis of formative assessment tasks. Student learning will be tracked through pre-post diagnostic assessments linked to learning progressions teachers use in their professional learning communities. Results from this work will advance knowledge about theory building through tools and resources along with evidence of their effectiveness, design criteria to guide formation of effective teacher collaboration around formative assessment design in professional learning communities, and model approaches for student performance relative to learning progressions. These end products will also provide instruments to help schools and districts collect evidence in real-time of professional learning community function and formative assessment task quality.