[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] In recent years, physics instructional labs have been under considerable research and development. However, there seems to be no shared understanding of how the assessment of instructional labs should be arranged to best serve students'…

Problem solving is considered an essential ability for becoming an expert in physics, and individualized feedback on the structure of problem-solving processes is a key component to support students in developing this ability. Problem-solving processes consist of multiple elements whose order forms the sequential structure of these processes.…

In this paper we argue that the complexity of education systems can lead to a lack of coherence in the implementation of policy. More effective educational change requires policymakers and researchers to pay more attention to supporting teachers in classrooms. As an example, we consider decades of research attempts in STEM education to implement…

Formative assessment during the course of instruction is an essential practice for supporting all students, including English learners (ELs), in the science classroom. It typically consists of three steps: (1) The teacher elicits information about student learning through various methods; (2) The teacher interprets (or makes sense of) that…

This study is about the effectiveness of concept maps as a formative assessment. It aimed to investigate the effectiveness of concept maps in formative assessment for the teaching and learning of biological concepts at the secondary level. One group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was used for this study. The experiment was completed in…

To be able to support students' competence development in solving physics problems over the course of a lesson series effectively, teachers need a proper appreciation of students' deficiencies. As teachers commonly assess students' competence by means of written tests, teachers are challenged to interpret students' work on these tests and to…

Chemistry faculty instructors (FIs) and graduate student instructors (GSIs) regularly engage in the evaluation and grading of student responses in formal formative and summative assessments. In this study, we identified dimensions of variation in these instructors' approaches to the evaluation and grading of students' answers. Using qualitative…

Fostering methods that promote learners' conceptual understanding is crucial for better performance in science subjects. This study investigated how teachers of physical sciences perceive the utilization of Concept Cartoons as a formative evaluation tool. Ten Grade 11 teachers selected from secondary schools in the Nelson Mandela Bay district of…

This case study examined teachers' on-the-fly formative assessment conversations, that is, how teachers collect information from students' thinking and use that information to support their learning during teacher-student interactions. Previous studies have typically analysed whole-class discussions on the level of speaking turns, and have…

Genetics plays an increasing role in modern life as evidenced by the development of revolutionary techniques such as CRISPR-based genome editing and the rise of personalized genome services. However, genetics is difficult to learn; known issues include its abstract nature, different scales, and technical language. Pedigree analysis is a…

The author created a project aimed to develop and implement the assessment of working scientifically (WS) skills at Victoria Park Primary School. The author had previously identified a gap in the curriculum coverage and assessment of WS skills and his goal was to address the lack of provision for assessing children's WS skills and raise the…

Peer assessment has been shown to advance learning, for example, by improving one's work, but the variance of learning benefits within or between studies has not been explained. The purpose of this case study was to examine what kinds of pathways students have through peer assessment and to study which factors affect them when peer assessment is…

Assessment is a contrivance of feedback for teachers. It not only gives information to teachers about their student performance, but also serve as an indicator for their self assessment. The aim of this study was to examine the status of intermediate level assessment procedure and level of satisfaction of stakeholders, i.e., teachers from the…

Formative assessment is a teaching method that helps to determine the prior knowledge of students, schedule the course plan accordingly, give it the final shape based on the feedback received from students, and encourage conceptual learning. The aim of this study is to introduce the "annotated student drawings" as one of the common…

Science learning is inherently multimodal, with students utilizing both drawings and writings to explain observations of physical phenomena. As such assessments in science should accommodate the many ways students express their understanding, especially given evidence that understanding is distributed across both drawing and writing. In recent…