Effects of formative assessment programmes on teachers’ knowledge about supporting students’ reflection

CC-BY-NC-ND Objective: In the past decade, several authors have advocated that formative assessment programmes have an impact on teachers’ knowledge. Consequently, various requirements have been proposed in the literature for the design of these programmes. Only few studies, however, have focused on a direct comparison between programmes with respect to differences observed in their effect on teachers’ knowledge. Therefore in this study we explored the impact of three formative assessment programmes on teachers’ knowledge about supporting students’ reflection. Methods: Our study was carried out in the domain of vocational nursing education. Teachers were assigned to an expertise-based assessment programme, a self-assessment combined with collegial feedback programme, or a negotiated assessment programme. We scored the verbal transcriptions of teachers’ responses to video vignette interviews in order to measure their knowledge in a pre- and post-test. Multilevel regression analyses were performed to investigate differences in teachers’ knowledge between the three programmes on the post-test; potential moderating effects of pre-test scores, contextual and individual factors were controlled for. Findings: The knowledge of teachers participating in the expertise-based assessment programme was significantly higher than that of teachers participating in the self-assessment combined with collegial feedback programme. Furthermore, the findings indicate that for professional learning, not only the approach to formative assessment is an important variable, but also the extent to which (a) teachers are intrinsically motivated and (b) they experience a high degree of collegiality at their school

A Case Study of Executive Functions in Real Process Modeling Sessions

Item does not contain fulltextAdvanced Information Systems Engineering Workshops: CAiSE 2019 International Workshops, Rome, Italy, June 3-7, 201

Support options provided and required for modeling with DynaLearn—A case study

Science educators strongly advocate the importance of scientific modeling within science education. Although widely advocated for students, modeling is a complex task involving integration of topics, "languages" and abstraction levels. Thus support for the modeling task and for developing modeling skills is required. The goal of our study was to explore how novice modelers use several support options while performing modeling assignments with DynaLearn—an intelligent learning environment for qualitative modeling. The support options differ by the type of support, the presentation of the support, the relation to previous support, the adaptation to the learner and timing. Findings are expected to influence modifications and further development of support methods as well as providing guidelines for effective teaching using DynaLearn. Additional contributions of the study are insights on how novice modelers approach a modeling task, what type of support they are looking for, how they use each of the different support types, and what kind of instructional interventions might be required

Key Characteristics of Successful Science Learning: The Promise of Learning by Modelling

The basic premise underlying this research is that scientific phenomena are best learned by creating an external representation that complies with the complex and dynamic nature of such phenomena. Effective representations are assumed to incorporate three key characteristics: they are graphical, dynamic, and provide a pre-specified outline of the domain. This study examined the impact of these characteristics on performance and learning. High school students first read an instructional text about glucose–insulin regulation and then created a representation of its content. Representations differed regarding the key characteristics such that the summary (n = 15), concept map (n = 16), model (n = 23), and outlined model (n = 21) all incorporated one additional characteristic compared to their precursor. Main results indicated learning effects in each of these four conditions. Furthermore, creating a model was found to enhance students’ learning more than creating a concept map, and students who completed an outlined model were found to learn more than those who created a model from scratch. In conclusion, this study does not univocally verify the necessity of all key characteristics individually, but the results do show that a representational format that combines all key characteristics enhances learning more than other formats