The purpose of this study is to shed light on the use of data in early education settings--specifically, North Carolina's Pre-K program. In this mixed-methods study, we draw upon in-depth interviews and survey data to examine (1) the types of data available to educators in Pre-K, (2) the ways in which data are intended to be used, (3) how data are…

The development and use of assessment systems to measure the performance and progress of teacher candidates and inform the continuous improvement of teacher education programs has been a longstanding priority in teacher education for the past 30 years. Teacher educators in the School of Education at a small public midwestern university revised and…

Formative assessment has been shown to be a critical activity for promoting meaningful understanding in the classroom. Systematic engagement in formative assessment helps instructors to develop a clearer picture of where students stand in relation to the learning objectives of the course. However, college instructors teaching large-enrollment STEM…

As part of the Foundations for Success in STEM project at Florida State University, more than thirty teams of teachers have used the Formative Assessment Collaborative Team (FACT) meeting model to work together toward better understanding of their students' mathematical thinking and its implications for instruction. This article provides a brief…

To understand the persistent social class achievement gap, researchers have investigated how educational settings affect lower versus higher socioeconomic status (SES) students' performance. We move beyond the question of actual performance to study its assessment by evaluators. We hypothesized that even in the absence of performance differences,…

As our practices often shape our attitudes, pedagogical methods may help students begin to cultivate religious ways of reading. Formative assessments play a large role in how our students encounter and engage with texts, yet as much as scholars have begun considering approaches to cultivating Christian pedagogical methods, assessment methods have…

On a daily basis, PreK-12 teachers make countless decisions about how to best meet their students' needs through assessment and instruction. However, their ability to justify these decisions is not frequently used as a resource for accountability measures or the evaluation of educational programs. The research presented here, which draws from a…

Formative assessment has long been used to gauge students' understanding of course material prior to taking an exam. With the advent of more advanced technology, only recently have instructors been able to combine formative assessment with a student response system to allow students to respond to questions in real time during class. Previous…

Twenty years after the publication of "Inside the Black Box," the landmark review of formative classroom assessment, international education experts Christine Harrison and Margaret Heritage tackle assessment for learning (AfL) anew, with fresh insights gained from two decades of research, theory, and classroom practice. "The Power…

The purpose of this inquiry was to conduct a formative evaluation of a rural Pennsylvania school district's dispositional hiring practices. The review of literature includes disposition evaluation methods and summarizes the controversial nature of evaluating dispositions. Interviews of administrators who ask dispositional questions, and newly…

Our main aim in this study was to compare encouraging feedback practices in Finnish general upper secondary foreign language classes and examine how students perceive language teachers' assessment practices. The participants were 160 students of English, 95 students of Swedish, and 27 students of French from six general upper secondary schools.…

In this study, conceptual and algebra-based physics students were engaged in scientific inquiry using Physics Education Technology (PhET) interactive simulations via semester-long group projects. The instructor and students used the Scientific Abilities Assessment Rubrics (SAAR) to evaluate project presentations and papers (formative assessment).…

Assessments built on a theory of learning progressions are promising formative tools to support learning and teaching. The quality and usefulness of those assessments depend, in large part, on the validity of the theory-informed inferences about student learning made from the assessment results. In this study, we introduced an approach to address…

Teachers' beliefs, professional development, access to hardware/software, and instructional contexts all influence teachers' use of technology (Ertmer et al., 2012; González-Carriedo & Esprívalo Harrell, 2018; Ottenbreit-Leftwich et al., 2010). The first three factors have been studied extensively, but additional research on the instructional…

Learner-centered coaching and feedback are relevant to various educational contexts. Spaced retrieval enhances long-term knowledge retention. We examined the efficacy of Blank Slate, a novel spaced retrieval software application, to promote learning and prevent forgetting, while gathering and analyzing data in the background about learners'…