A Design Research On Enhancement Of Teacher’s Formative Assessment Skills In High School Mathematics Classroom

In this research, formative assessment has been defined as an assessment carried out during the instructional process for the purpose of improving teaching or learning (Popham,2008). A vast amount of research and reviews shows that the use of formative assessment in classroom practice is one of the most educationally effective ways to increase student’s achievement (e.g. Black&Wiliam,1998, Hattie,2009; National Mathematics Advisory Panel,2008). However, there also exists research results indicate that how to effectively help teachers to implement a formative assessment practice is lacking (Schneider&Randel,2010; Wiliam,2010). In this research, we use educational design research method and a series of qualitative research tools such as classroom observation, semi-constructive interview, and stimulate reflection, etc. to investigate the impact of a professional development program on mathematics teachers’ practices of formative assessment. During the professional development activity, teachers are learning to integrate instruction and assessment in the lesson, examine students’ learning progression by questioning and then provide immediate feedbacks accordingly to push students learning forward.The overarching goal of our research is trying to know the effective professional development activities that can facilitate teacher learning the skill of implement formative assessment in their daily mathematics classroom instruction.In order to achieve this goal, we will focus on the following two sub questions:1. What are the main procedures on the development of formative assessment skills (FAS) in mathematics classroom? In each procedure, what types of professional development practices could be effectively scaffolding teacher’s assessment practice? 2. What are the essential elements of formative assessment in mathematics classroom? How does teacher solve students’math problems as well as meet their need by the use of FASs?Teacher who want to develop FAS need to undergo a learning process, which is time consuming and complexity. Effective formative assessment skills should be embodied in a specific mathematics context or topic. In our research, we select3subject teachers that focus on the three mathematics contents, which are the concept of function, mathematics reading comprehension and interests on mathematics.Based on the findings, we have drawn the conclusions that could answer the original questions.In this research, we use the educational design research method, and some qualitative research tools such as field notes, classroom observation, teaching transcripts, semi-constructive interview, stimulate reflection, etc. Based on the findings, we have drawn the conclusions that could answer the original two questions:First, with the support of the professional developer, all of three teachers develop the FASs in their own classes, which have improve their learning achievement on the concept of function, the ability on Mathematics reading comprehension and interest on mathematic separately. We have generated a4-step professional development model, which can effectively scaffolds teacher’s improvement of FAS in different contexts. In briefly, they are setting instructional goals; design formative assessment lesson; conducting classroom instruction; and result evaluation, respectively. And teacher’ FAS can be improved by the cyclic practice of these four steps.The effective facilitating strategies in each phase of the professional development model includes:(1) feedbacks that focus on teachers questions;(2) Real time feedback (via email or oral);(3) explorative discussion between teacher and professional developer;(4) teacher does lesson design with the scaffold of the FAL Design Framework;(5) after class talk;(6) stick post-its note;(7) teaching reflection;(8)stimulate videos;(9) semi-structured depth interview.Second, the effective FASs and instructional principles that generated from each case includes:(1) follow students’ thinking;(2) carefully listen to the students before intervene;(3) teacher-student communicating followed the model of I-R-R...E(F);(4) feedback focus on students’ problem or confusing;(5) oral repeat student’s thinking by switching the original words;(6) waiting time;(7) student play the role of teacher;(8)meta-cognitive strategies.After this professional development activity,3subject teachers’ classroom instruction and teaching beliefs have changed a lot, which are showing as follow:(1) Teachers have refined the original theoretical knowledge to more comprehensible, as well as build up new instructional principles.(2) Teachers have the ability of design formative assessment lessons by their own which can better solve varies kinds of mathematics topics.(3) Teachers have paid more attention to their students’ thinking and build up many effective teacher-student communicating strategies.