Leveraging disciplinary practices to support students’ active participation in formative assessment

Abstract

Studies of disciplinary work have converged with studies of classrooms to highlight the social and cultural nature of disciplinary knowledge and practices, and of classroom learning and assessment. For students to become discerning and autonomous/authoring learners, classroom assessment needs to ensure students experience what it means to exercise discernment as part of collective and individual decision-making. In this paper, we adopt a sociocultural lens and focus on student appreciation and use of disciplinary norms and practices within a classroom community of scholars as both a means and an end for learning and its assessment. We illustrate student responses to the way their primary teacher combined disciplinary norms with formative assessment practices to help them appreciate and experience how knowledge is generated and warranted within biotechnology. We argue that when sources of authority are distributed and used to scope possibilities, students experience learning as the development of autonomy and discernment.