Exploring the Role of Language in Physics Teachers’ Everyday Assessment Practice

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although the promotion of students’ language proficiency is an objective of all school subjects, many physics teachers self-evidently expect their students to apply sophisticated language repertoires. We assume that this expectation affects how physics teachers assess students’ texts in a classroom assessment. More precisely, we suppose that physics teachers confound students’ achievements in terms of content and language. To our knowledge, there is hardly any research about the role of language in physics teachers’ everyday assessment practices. Thus, to verify our supposition, we conducted an exploratory mixed-method study with 21 German in-service physics teachers. To collect valid empirical data, we asked the participants to assess a selection of four answers to a short essay question written by secondary school students. The four texts were chosen with systematically varied quality in terms of content and language (from low to high). The teachers were asked to think aloud while assessing the students’ texts. Moreover, we conducted post-interviews with the teachers and challenged them to perform pairwise comparisons of the four students’ texts. The verbal reports of each participant were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using multiple techniques (i.e., qualitative content analysis and non-parametric statistics). In summary, the most plausible interpretation of our exploratory findings is that the teachers in our study moderately confound content-related and language-related students’ achievements. Finally, the implications of this finding for science education research and science teacher education are outlined.