Enactment of Ongoing Formative Assessment: Challenges and Opportunities for Professional Development and Practice

Formative assessment practices have been shown to improve science instruction. However, examples of teachers' moment-to-moment informal formative assessment practices are still sparse. This multiple-case study explores the ongoing formative assessment practices of 4 in-service science teachers who participated in a statewide professional development program. We examined what teachers (can) do when enacting formative assessment with specific science content. Our findings suggest that these teachers were able to enact some components of formative assessment in a piecemeal fashion, but they tended to struggle with integrating formative assessment practices to enact seamless science instruction that was both rigorous and responsive to their students' ideas. This was especially true as they attempted to explore and use students' scientific ideas to push for deeper understanding. The analysis of formative assessment critical moments, however, suggests that these teachers could effectively enact aspects of formative assessment in ways that may have supported student teaming of science and may have acted as stepping-stones to improve teachers' formative assessment practices. We discuss how teachers' current practices currently align (or do not align) with the Next Generation Science Standards and the implications of this nonalignment for the design of professional development in formative assessment in science.