Changing Assessment Practices in Science Classrooms

Abstract

Teaching is a highly personal activity where teachers bring together and make sense of notions of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. This chapter sets out to explore teachers’ formative and summative assessment practices in science classrooms and outline some of the tensions and synergies when wanting to change their assessment practices. It describes episodes from a collaborative action research project with science teachers designed to support the strengthening of classroom assessment practices—the King’s Researching Expertise in Science Teaching (KREST) project. This project focused on the professional learning of teachers and used professional discussion of evidence for teachers to reflect on and justify their actions in their own classrooms. By challenging what and why certain decisions were made helped the teachers strengthen both their understanding of what effective classroom assessment construed and their resolve to make such practices work in their own institutions. This enabled the science teachers to construct pedagogic knowledge by clarifying their own understanding and so reinforced their pedagogical identity as they interacted with others. Each of the teachers collected evidence of their developing practice in a portfolio, and their narratives explained the professional journey that they took as they reconciled their classroom assessment practices.