Tracing the naturalization of a learning progression centered assessment system in a teacher community

Abstract

The goal of this study is to investigate how a learning-progression-centered assessment system mediated the collaborative efforts between teachers and researchers in reorienting assessment toward improving the quality of instruction and supporting student learning. In particular, this study aims to understand how the learning-progression-centered assessment system can support teachers to orchestrate productive classroom discussion based on the path outlined in the learning progression to make conceptual progress. The analysis of four case teachers provides evidence that the assessment system supported teachers in developing understandings of the big ideas of data, chance and statistics and of the learning progressions of statistical reasoning. In addition, the assessment system supported the teachers in transforming assessment practices in their classrooms. The teachers demonstrated construct-centered orchestration of assessment talk: structuring classroom interaction centered on important mathematical ideas represented in the classification system and/or aligning the instructional trajectory with the learning progressions to support student learning. This study suggests that learning progressions as a classification system can be an effective tool to disrupt the historically developed classificatory system for assessment in modern schooling (i.e., right or wrong) and eventually overwrite it with a disciplinary perspective on mathematics. The field needs to develop more content-specific classification systems to inspect qualities of students’ reasoning and teachers’ interpretations of students’ reasoning.