Student Work Samples Research Articles

Exploring the Effective Use of Diagnostic Tests in the High School English Classroom to Support Student Learning: An Action Research Study

This action research study investigated the use of diagnostic tests and feedback to support student learning in a 12th grade English classroom. The researcher developed a diagnostic test to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses in foundational language and literacy skills. The test included multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions. The researcher then separated students into an experimental group, which received diagnostic feedback, individualized learning plans, and incentives, and a controlled group which proceeded with the regular curriculum. The individualized learning plans were created based on the results of the diagnostic test and were designed to address each student’s specific needs. The incentives included extra credit points, certificates of achievement, and public recognition. Several sources of quantitative and qualitative data were analysed, including pre and post-test scores, student surveys, teacher surveys, and student work samples. The results indicated that the intervention had a significant positive impact on students’ learning, confidence, and test anxiety compared to the controlled group. Implications for the use of diagnostic assessment in the secondary English classroom are discussed.

Health literacy pedagogies and assessment embedded in a school-based health education program

AbstractStudies have focused on the development of teachers’ Health Literacy (HL) pedagogies but have yet to focus on building teachers’ assessment capacity. The aims of this research study were three-fold: 1) professionally develop teachers to enhance the HL planned in a Health and Physical Education (HPE) program and assessment task; 2) validate a previously developed curricular model of HL assessment (rubric) using student work samples; 3) measure students HL learning using an adaptation of the validated rubric. Researchers used a descriptive single school case study, using a mixed methods approach in an Independent, coeducational early learning, primary and secondary day school in Sydney, Australia to work closely with participants to review the pedagogical knowledge, learning activities and assessment within a HPE program using Nutbeam’s three level HL hierarchy. Using Messick’s six aspects of construct validity testing of the rubric was completed using 20 sample assessment tasks, as well as receiving feedback on the adaptability and feasibility of the rubric. The validated rubric was then adapted to the assessment task to measure students’ HL. Results demonstrated that professional development had a positive impact on the development of planned HL pedagogies as shown by a 17% increase in planned critical HL learning activities. Findings suggest that the validated rubric is a feasible and adaptable tool that teachers can use to measure students’ HL. This is the first study to validate a curricular model of measuring HL. Future research needs to develop teachers’ HL capabilities and assessment literacy.

Extending science instruction beyond the CER: Use of critical questions in the argumentation of middle school science students

AbstractCritiquing arguments is important for K‐12 science students to learn but not emphasized by the predominant claim‐evidence‐reasoning (CER) argumentation model. Drawing on the work of Yu and Zenker (2020), and Dove and Nussbaum (2018), we developed a tool for supplementing CER with critical questions (CQs) from philosophy that cover most, if not all, the logical dimensions of argument critique. Six middle school science teachers designed lessons involving argumentation, including the use of CQs. We assessed the effects on student self‐efficacy for engaging in argument critique, teacher self‐efficacy for using argument pedagogy, and teachers’ perceptions of the value of CQs. Qualitative data included teacher interviews, lesson transcripts, and student work samples. Quantitative data included surveys of student self‐efficacy administered at the beginning and end of the school year. There was evidence suggesting an increase over time in students’ confidence for engaging in argument critique and teachers’ confidence with argument pedagogy. However, only four of the six teachers were confident and skilled enough to include CQs in their lessons. Those who did use CQs tended to perceive them as providing a helpful structure for critique, prompts for deeper thinking, and a tool for fostering critical classroom norms. Discussion of CQs may have benefitted students’ writing by promoting peer critique and encouragement to elaborate. Overall, CQs afford students with a framework for judging argument strength. Scientific argumentation involving CQs provides a more contemporary philosophical basis for scientific argumentation than CER or the Toulmin model as it emphasizes the critical and dialogic nature of science.

Fourth Graders’ Guided Inquiry into Local Public Issues of Birmingham

In this manuscript, the authors discuss a seven-day research project that occurred within the Birmingham metropolitan area where fourth graders researched the role that public issues played in the creation of two suburban school systems in their city. We coded student work samples to look for themes. Emergent themes from student work samples are described in the findings section. We conclude in our discussion section with some recommendations for future research studies to teach issues of race in U.S. history based on our findings.

Effectiveness of Assessment Exemplars in a Business Management Course

Samples of past and present student work should not just be kept away in the faculty drawers, cabinets or simply stored in the digital space. There are many benefits from these valuable pieces of work that can be shared with their peers and future students. By sharing and showing these exemplars, students understand better the expectations for their own work to obtain good grades. They not only learn to benchmark their work against their peers and understand the assessment requirements better, but most importantly, exemplars provide them guidance when undertaking a piece of assessment. This action research explores the use of assessment exemplars and its effectiveness on Business Management students in a pre-university programme at a private university in Malaysia. A basic qualitative approach using focus group discussions was adopted. Four major themes on the impact of assessment exemplars emerged from the focus group discussions, namely assessment exemplars provide guidance, make students aware of standards and expectations, provide motivation to start writing, and builds confidence. This study provides insights into understanding students’ experience in using exemplars in the pre-university context.

Disciplinary skills are not enough: Resituating historical thinking within students’ racialized and linguistic experiences

ABSTRACT Background Drawing from research with 11th-grade history students, the authors illustrate how students’ racial/ethnic and language experiences influence their analysis of Mexican American discrimination. Latinx students’ experiences with white privilege helped them understand why 1940s Mexican Americans claimed whiteness to access better schools. However, students’ experiences with instruction for Emergent Bilingual (EB) students interfered with seeing language segregation as a proxy for racial/ethnic discrimination. Methods The first author collected three days of classroom field notes, conducted 15 student interviews, and collected 177 student work samples. The authors used a grounded theory approach to identify how students’ racialized experiences help or hinder their historical analysis. Findings The findings suggest that students’ racialized experiences interplay with the disciplinary concepts of contextualization and presentism. Our findings complicate how disciplinary concepts alone do not sufficiently help students analyze how systemic racism manifests differently across historical moments. Contribution This paper offers implications for how historical thinking skills can make space for students’ racialized and linguistic experiences. Incorporating raciolinguistic analysis in tandem with historical thinking skills can lead to more nuanced conversations in the classroom about race/ethnicity and language in the past and present.

Writer as Character: Creating “One-Pager” Tabletop Roleplaying Games in the First Year Composition Classroom

This proposed session/paper reflects on an assignment in a first-year writing course where students create a “one pager” tabletop roleplaying game based on writing a research paper. This assignment is designed to both support skill transfer through defamiliarizing the process of research writing through translation to the roleplaying game, and to define the persona (or player-character) of the writer, exploring the materiality of the writerly identity. This assignment is rooted in a composition pedagogy that centers the identity of the author as a complex piece of the writing puzzle, building on feminist and queer pedagogies (Jung 2005; Hawisher 2003; Alexander and Rhodes 2011) and interrogating Aristotelian conceptions of ethos and identity. Building on both persona and frame theories of tabletop roleplaying games (see Waskul and Lust 2004; Fine 1983; MacKay 2001; Grouling Cover 2010), this assignment asks that students not only conceptualize the writing process but the writer themself, as a character that exists in the created game–a persona existing in the “gameplay” frame. After creating their own games, students play the games created by the peers and subsequently reflect on the “character” they were invited to play, thinking about how their own complex, intersectional, and performed identity shapes their writing. This assignment lays bare both the intersections between person, writer, and text, and the processes and skills required to craft a research paper. This session will include the assignment sheet, samples of student work, and reporting on the experience, as well as a thorough grounding in the composition and TTRPG theories that undergird the work.

Understanding K‐3 Teachers' Literacy Instructional Practices During the Pandemic‐Impacted 2020–2021 School Year

AbstractThis instrumental case study is focused on understanding more about literacy instruction in K‐3 classrooms during the pandemic‐impacted 2020–2021 school year. The study aims to examine (a) how teachers described their literacy instruction before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic; (b) the types of literacy instructional practices teachers implemented across in‐person, virtual, and hybrid modalities; and (c) how teachers' implementation of these practices aligns with research on early grades literacy instruction. Data included classroom video of 25 teachers' literacy instruction, 162 classroom artifacts (e.g., student work samples), and statewide survey responses from 7110 teachers in spring 2020 and 5811 teachers in spring 2021. Teachers reported spending an average of 1 h less per week on literacy instruction in 2020–2021 as compared to a typical pre‐pandemic school year. Despite these reported declines in instructional time, teachers in all modalities were observed implementing literacy instructional practices at comparable rates as they reported prior to the pandemic. However, teachers' implementations of these practices varied widely, with some teachers providing research‐aligned literacy instruction while others did not. This range in quality was evident across modalities, including within the group of teachers providing in‐person instruction. Results from this study challenge existing theories about instructional time and modality that have been posed to explain the pandemic's negative impacts on elementary students' literacy outcomes.

Emphasizing the professional in PDS

PurposeThis article describes an effort to ease the tension between boundary spanning roles for interns participating in a yearlong Professional Development School (PDS) program. In order to do this, the structure of a Social Studies Methods course was revised to mimic a professional learning community (PLC) and assignments were not evaluated for grades.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual paper that relies on self-reflection as well as student reaction, work samples and survey data.FindingsThe findings demonstrate both practices contribute to a collegial and less stressful environment for interns, while not affecting the quality of work submitted.Originality/valueThis paper highlights two of the nine NAPDS essentials, Professional Learning and Leading (3) and Boundary Spanning (8), and describes the ways both are incorporated and addressed in a PDS situated methods course. Describing course revisions, including the implementation of an ungrading practice, provides examples for potential replication.

Dr. Seuss, police reports, and lamb recipes: Examining text reformulation as a literacy strategy

AbstractEngaging college students in purposeful academic tasks designed to foster both reading and writing competencies requires calculated decision‐making regarding the goals and benefits of the literacy tasks used in college courses. Consequently, we explore text reformulation as a literacy strategy that aims to enrich students' reading and writing competencies. Text reformulation, taking one text and recreating it in a new form, can be used to provide opportunities for students to develop reading and writing competencies like analyzing story details and sequencing, using mentor texts, and considering audience awareness. Drawing on recorded small group and whole class conversations, student work samples, and student reflections, this study considers how preservice teachers created meaning of an existing short story and applied it to new modalities. Implications for implementing text reformulation in middle, secondary, and college programs are highlighted, including orienting students to the task, teaching text structures, and guiding students through issues of purpose, audience, and tone.

Learning to facilitate student voice in primary physical education

Student voice pedagogies in physical education (PE) offer teachers a mechanism to promote meaningful experiences by actively engaging students in decision-making regarding their learning. Over one academic year, the experiences of one generalist classroom teacher's enactment of student voice pedagogies in their primary PE practice were explored within a Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practice (S-STTEP) frame. Data sources included post-lesson personal reflections, a researcher journal, and transcripts from meetings with a critical friend. Qualitative data was also collected from students ( n = 19) over a shorter timeframe of six months, and took the form of student work samples, along with transcripts from focus group interviews ( n = 2, with eight total participants). Findings show that the enactment of student voice pedagogies requires significant scaffolding for both the teacher and their students. The teacher needs to learn how to listen to, nurture, and act on their students’ voices, while students require assistance in developing their capacity to share their voices. Thus, the enactment of student voice pedagogies takes time, and necessitates a period of trial and error, to ensure the educator is providing authentic student voice opportunities in their practice. This study adds an additional layer to student voice research by providing a teacher's perspective of learning how to enact student voice pedagogies in PE. Furthermore, the findings add to the limited research into the use of student voice pedagogies at primary level.

Creating the Conditions for Geographic Conceptual Development in Post-Primary Students through Collaborative Guided Inquiry

This paper explores the potential for a collaborative guided inquiry task to stimulate geographic thinking using core geographic concepts of ‘location’, ‘distance and direction’, ‘scale’, ‘symbols’, ‘relative location’ and ‘slope and topography.’ The guided inquiry began with a visit to a park, with students then applying geographic thinking to redesign the park in a way that optimised utility for various user groups. The data generated included student work samples and video recordings of student groups as they worked through the task. The results show that the task design facilitated a deeper understanding of geographic concepts, including spatial relationships, connections and interactions. Furthermore, the collaborative nature of the task prompted students to use skills of explaining, negotiating and justifying their decisions. A critical feature of this analysis is the role that the teacher has in providing specialised guidance to support geographic thinking based on the needs of each group. The study highlights the value of practical, real-world experiences in geography education to learn, discuss and explore geographic concepts, enabling development of critical thinking, reasoning and problem-solving skills.

Using virtual teacher PD to support implementation of a historical literacy curriculum

PurposeThis study aims to explore how teachers in a large, diverse district could use a complex adolescent literacy curriculum, and it coincided with the start of the coronavirus 2019 pandemic, also a time of great upheaval for this nation. The authors and district partners collaboratively designed document sets that could help students explore socially complex historical topics with discipline-specific reading and writing support. These challenges led to fully virtual PD and redesigned cognitive tools and lesson materials that could be used in a fully distanced learning environment.Design/methodology/approachPD and data collection were ongoing and iterative, as the authors' goals were to understand variability in teachers' understanding and how the social unrest in the nation and the need for distance learning would influence their application of our curriculum. Data sources included teacher artifacts, interviews and implementation surveys and anonymized student work samples. The third author wrote memos during webinars and district meetings. The authors employed a grounded theory approach to analyze teachers’ evolving understandings of how to teach students to make judgments, their lesson differentiation and their attention to social justice issues.FindingsTeachers who attended the authors' online PD increased their knowledge of the authors' cognitive apprenticeship (CA) approach to instruction, demonstrating more sophisticated understandings of important historical thinking skills and the need to provide students with explicit instruction and appropriate cognitive scaffolds. By the end of the year, teachers also showed ease in using new technological platforms and a more flexible use of disciplinary thinking scaffolds in ways the authors hoped. Finally, teachers in the authors' sample (and their students) frequently made connections between topics and sources in the authors' curriculum and ongoing societal problems (such as systemic racism) in this nation.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors' original sample of teachers was over 70; however, this number eventually fell to nine teachers (about 12.5% of the eligible participants) due to many ongoing challenges (e.g. teaching while parenting) during this time period. The authors note that teachers who remained engaged with the authors had over 10 years of experience and all but one had at some point been in a leadership position such as a team lead or department head. It is possible that experience teachers found on the authors' curriculum intervention to be too challenging to implement during the pandemic.Practical implicationsOnline PD can be successful when sessions focus on content that teachers will use with students. We provided video models showing teachers how to teach historical reading and writing using the authors' tools and supports authors' platform. Although brief, the authors gave teachers opportunities for collaborative practice during webinars, and time to share challenges related to virtual teaching. In return, teachers shared what was working for them and allowed the authors to use anonymized student materials as the basis for subsequent materials for teaching students to make historical judgments.Social implicationsAll students, including those with learning or attentional disabilities/difficulties, emergent bilingual students, underrepresented students or marginalized students, must learn to grapple with complex historical and political information. Doing so will support their ability to make sense of conflicting and/or politicized information that pervades the media today and to judge for themselves what counts as evidence and truth.Originality/valueAlthough there are a small number of teachers, this study shows that a strong research partnership between a university and district office can support the successful implementation of a complex historical literacy curriculum that allows students to explore social justice issues while learning important disciplinary literacy skills. Future work will share student learning outcomes.

Noticing instructional challenges in artifacts of teaching

AbstractThis study investigates challenges of enactment teachers notice when analyzing artifacts of teaching in a professional development focused on supporting the enactment of NGSS‐aligned modeling instruction. Five secondary science teachers participated in a semester‐long video club. Transcripts of the segments of their meetings in which they analyzed artifacts of practice were coded to characterize what they noticed in videos and student work samples from their own and others’ classrooms of students engaging in sensemaking. Through an inductive and iterative approach, three main linguistic challenges were identified related to the teachers’ noticing of students’ disciplinary thinking: learning how to communicate with precision using modeling conventions, how to communicate with precision using scientific vocabulary, and how to support students explaining and defending their models. The findings of this study extend and affirm prior research on teachers’ noticing of student thinking by highlighting the integrated nature of disciplinary noticing and the entanglement of learning science concepts and the language of science. The results also indicate that artifact‐rich professional development designed to improve science teachers’ interpretation of their students’ thinking can support teachers as they work through problems of practice they encounter in their attempts to enact responsive science teaching.

A review of research on assessment use: implications for preparing early childhood educators for data-informed decision-making

ABSTRACT The article describes a systematic review of 109 studies using the data-informed decision-making framework to understand the sources of assessment data and the main purposes for assessment use among early childhood educators. Findings revealed assessment use is driven by the purposes of measuring and monitoring children’s learning and development, informing instructional next steps, communicating with caregivers, and identifying students for early intervention. Standardized assessments of multiple domains, teacher observations, student work samples, and student background information emerged as key sources that inform decision-making. We noted several factors that likely influence teachers’ assessment use to consider in preparing teachers for DIDM. We describe these considerations in terms of structural-, teacher-, child development, and assessment tool-related influences. Early childhood assessment use is different from primary or secondary contexts that largely inform the DIDM literature. We conclude with implications for preparing educators’ DIDM by presenting six skillsets to foster their ability to engage in critical thinking about standardized assessments, engage in intentional observation, generate high-quality data, engage caregivers as consumers and sources of data, use multiple data sources for early intervention identification, and advocate against accountability-driven DIDM.

Teachers’ support in developing year 7 students’ argumentation skills about water-based socioscientific issues

ABSTRACT Internationally, there are calls for students to be able to use their scientific understandings to make informed decisions about the world in which they live. Using a mixed methods case study design, this study investigated the impact of behaviours and strategies used by two early career science teachers who taught argumentation about a water-based socioscientific issues (SSI) to their Year 7 students. Students’ argument quality, measured using Toulmin’s argument structure, improved significantly from pre- to post-instruction (p = .0033). There was also a significant increase (p = .0037) in the number of types of categories. Qualitative data comprising classroom audio-transcripts, field notes, student work samples, teacher interviews and student reflections were analysed using inductive analysis to identify four themes related to teacher behaviours and teaching strategies: (1) developing and maintaining a safe classroom environment; (2) providing clear instructions about the features of quality arguments; (3) providing opportunities for all students to think and work individually and collaboratively; and (4) practising oral and written argument construction with gradual removal of scaffolds. While the findings are not generalisable teacher educators can use their expertise to decide the extent to which the teacher strategies and behaviours would support the development of argumentation skills in their particular context.

Out with the Old, in with the New: Digital Interactive Journals in an Elementary Language Arts Methods Course

In this article, two elementary literacy teacher educators provide elementary language arts content and methods by implementing digital interactive journals in a face-to-face classroom setting. The authors present how this practice evolved from traditional interactive journals pre-COVID to an innovative and engaging learning experience post-COVID. Interactive journals provide students with opportunities to explore and apply content and methods, while also learning a teaching strategy that pre-service teachers can implement in their own elementary classrooms. The authors describe the design and development of digital interactive journals along with student work samples and instructional steps to transfer and implement this strategy across disciplines.

Nurturing Group Creativity in Mathematical Modeling through Role Playing

ABSTRACTPedagogical strategies for nurturing group creativity in school mathematics have remained largely unexplored despite their significance. In this study, we explored the use of role playing in mathematical modeling activities for nurturing group creativity in a 9th‐grade mathematics class in Korea. We described the theoretical bases and types of roles that nurture group creativity while examining the effects of role playing and the factors that seem to promote it. The data of this study included lesson observations, samples of student work, and interviews with 20 participating students and their teachers. The interactions of the five groups of students were compared and analyzed. The results suggest that role playing contributes to nurturing group creativity by inducing interactions and improving creative synergies. The factors that seem to promote role playing are students' understanding of role playing, a comfortable environment, the thought evaluator's role‐playing effectiveness, and the need to make a mathematical decision. Based on these findings, we recommend that creativity researchers build on these findings to further explore how group creativity can be enhanced in mathematical modeling through role playing.

Utilization of E-Portfolios for Charting the Physical Literacy Journeys of Students in Secondary PE Classes

A physically educated person is characterized as an individual who has the motivation, competence, understanding, and knowledge to enjoy physical activity in a healthy way. Given that physical literacy (PL) development is a lifelong process, the recording of the process, called charting, has critical importance in PL development. This study aimed to explore features of student participation in an e-portfolio for charting PL and its impacts on student learning. Participants were 10 middle school students selected on the basis of gender, technological competence, and interest in physical education. Participants took part in PL charting programs for 10 weeks by utilizing an e-portfolio developed by the researcher. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with participants and student work samples retrieved from the e-portfolio. The features of students’ PL charting in the e-portfolio were categorized as (a) digital fumblers, (b) superficial participants, (c) passionate creators, and (d) journey reflectors, depending upon the levels of technological competence and motivation for PL recording activities. Participation in PL charting through an e-portfolio (a) enhanced sense of achievement and motivation for future PL growth in students, (b) enabled students to obtain tailored strategic support from the teacher, and (c) helped them perceive learning as continual growth. The findings of this study suggest an e-portfolio can be a viable tool for PL charting by providing opportunities to keep track of students’ learning process and reflect on their PL-related learning activities.

Analyzing Prospective Elementary Teachers’ Evidence of Conceptual Understanding and Procedural Fluency

ABSTRACT This paper shares findings from the study of a learning sequence designed to support prospective elementary teachers (PTs) in identifying evidence of conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. Conceptual understanding and procedural fluency are widely recognized as important to teaching and learning mathematics, and identifying evidence of each is emphasized on teacher candidates’ high-stakes performance assessments. As PTs practiced selecting evidence from student work samples, our analysis revealed successes as well as associated challenges. Our findings suggest areas for supporting PTs’ learning, as well as challenges stemming from the inherent overlap of these two knowledge types. This study raises important questions about the value of emphasizing PTs’ ability to cite evidence of conceptual understanding and procedural fluency, given their integrated nature.