Making Use of Student

Thinking
How can we use powerful
formative assessment tools to
inform our teaching?
Presenters: Taylor Langolf, Rachel Longo, Alissa Neff, and Miranda Roberts
Changing Formative Assessments
Traditional methods include:
● thumbs-up or thumbs-
down
● fist of five
● etc.
The above methods are
shallow and do not show a
student’s thought process
Open-ended formative
assessment will allow us to
gauge what students actually
know.
● Requires students to
explain their thinking
● Gives insight into patterns
in student understanding
● Allows us to adjust our
teaching to fit our students.
Eliciting Individual Student Thinking
Open-ended formative assessments require students to
grapple with the subject matter and how they process it.

This gives us a lot of valuable information such as:

● Are they just spitting back information? (Vocabulary without

context?)
● Can they provide evidence for the way they are thinking?
● Can they summarize what their classmates have said?
 Formative Assessments
are a great way to get out
How Do We Make what students already
know and find out what
Use of the misconceptions students
Evidence Students have, but what do we
actually DO once we have
Give Us? collected these
assessments?
Making Use Of Student Thinking
1. Present your probe, assessment, or assignment to
students
2. Collect student responses
3. Pay attention to trends and patterns
4. Use these patterns to inform future teaching?
○ This is the tricky part!
How Can We Use These Patterns to
Inform Our Teaching?

Four Cases of Using Formative

Assessment to Find Patterns
Case #1 - Miranda Roberts
Unit: Genetics
The formative assessment used was based on the open-ended
response style found in Page Keeley’s Uncovering Student Ideas
in Science books. The probe presented can be seen below.

Vocabulary expected: homozygous, heterozygous, dominant,

recessive, gene, allele
A Purposeful Assessment
The purpose was to gauge initial thought processes and
understandings early on in the unit.

The goal was to ensure that students had a firm grasp on

genetic vocabulary and the basic concepts of inheritance
patterns before pushing forward into more complex material.

The specific goal of the probe was to get an explanation of the

pattern of inheritance seen in the prompt including concepts of
basic Mendelian genetics using appropriate vocabulary.
Categorizing Student Responses
Results were categorized into predetermined, “levels of
understanding” based on their explanation of the phenomena.

Three levels:

○ Advanced understanding
○ Intermediate understanding
○ Weak/poor understanding

These categorized data were sorted using Excel spreadsheets.

Student Work Sample
Weak Understanding
● An example of “vocab
vomit”.

● This student picked up

“this is happening to Mr. Bondys
on some ideas. flowers because the seeds must
have heterozygous genes with
● Not making dominant purple genes that
connections to overpowered the white”
patterns of
inheritance.
Student Work Sample
Intermediate/Weak
Understanding:
● This student uses vocabulary

● They know that white does not
show because it is recessive, but
does not seem to know what the
parent & offspring genotypes look
like.
● Explanation fails to tie the facts to
the underlying concepts of
patterns of inheritance.
“Homozygous trait that was
dominant and purple…
heterozygous recessive trait
that was recessive and
purple… combine and create
a white flower but does not
show because white is
recessive.”
Student Work Samples
Advanced Understanding
● Very clear explanation of
the phenomena.

● States correct parent & “The genotype of the purple flower is

homozygous dominant (PP). The
offspring genotype & genotype of the white flower is
phenotype homozygous recessive (pp). When
they crossed there is a 100% chance
of all [offspring] being purple (Pp).
● Understands the link Unfortunately for Bondy, the
between facts and offspring were all heterozygous
dominant (Pp) and purple.”
concepts of inheritance
Making Sense of Student Data
Placing responses into the three categories of weak,
intermediate, and advanced helped in finding general trends
across the class and note any severe misunderstandings
individual students may have had.

As seen in the student work samples, some concepts clearly

needed reteaching and could be approached in a different way.
Making Use of Student Responses
The general trend across the class indicated many students
needed more practice utilizing vocabulary.

Many responses were shallow - students may have been using

vocabulary correctly, but do they really know the underlying
concepts?

Students needed another chance to connect the vocabulary to

the concepts.
Encouraging Student Collaboration
To help students that were struggling, students were partnered
into groups of four based on ability which was determined by
the levels of understanding from the probe.

Groupings:

● 1 Advanced student
● 2 Intermediate/weak Student
● 1 Weak Student

These groupings were intended to have the stronger students

help the weaker students.
How to Address Misconceptions
It was clear that some students were using certain terms
interchangeably, so starting with a comparison of those tricky
terms was the first step to gaining understanding of these
terms.
Collaboration Using Visual Methods
Comparing Similar Terms:

Students were asked to make a “T” chart on whiteboards

comparing vocabulary (gene vs. allele, homozygous vs.
heterozygous, dominant vs. recessive)

As whole group we considered the whiteboard examples and

definitions of each group and adjusted as needed.
Collaboration Increasing Confidence and Accuracy
I opened up a whole class discussion directly after the
comparisons to re-address the prompt given to them a few
days past.

Students really opened up which led to drastically better verbal

responses. Students were more confident in their use of the
language and were able to use it correctly and make
connections between terms in both writing and conversation.
One More “Mini-Assessment”
As a warm up for the next class, to really make sure the
students understood the concepts, a new prompt about “Mr.
Bondy’s Garden” was asked:

This gave students one more chance to express their thinking

about the concepts before we moved onto more complex
content.
This time around, answers were more thorough.

This student, among many others, was able to make a clear

connection with the pattern of inheritance between generations
while using appropriate vocabulary.