“Deepening Our Understanding of Formative Assessment: Day-to-Day Variation of Formative Assessment Practices”

Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo is a professor at the School of Education and Human Development, University of Colorado Denver, where she is director of the Research Center and director of the Laboratory of Educational Assessment, Research, and InnovatioN (LEARN). Her work, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences, examines teachers’ assessment practices and the assessment of student learning both in the classroom and in large-scale assessment programs. Her publications address the development and evaluation of multiple learning assessment strategies and the study of teachers’ informal and formal formative assessment practices. Her recent work focuses on the development and evaluation of assessments that are instructionally sensitive and instruments intended to measure teachers’ formative assessment practices. She is co-editor of a special issue on assessment in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. She has published in Science, Educational Measurement: Issues and Practices, the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, and other major technical educational research journals.                                          

Professor Ruiz-Primo’s talk will focus on a project whose purpose is to develop measures of teachers’ formative assessment practices. More specifically, it will focus on what we have learned about how formative assessment practices vary from day to day during the implementation of 26 entire mathematics and science units from 20 teachers. Data collected across 420 days allowed us to know more about how formative assessment practices evolve every day and from instructional task to instructional task. The talk will present information from sub-studies that have been conducted with the entire data set.