Ebby, Caroline B
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Publication Pathways for Analyzing and Responding to Student Work for Formative Assessment: The Role of Teachers’ Goals for Student Learning(2019-07-26) Ebby, Caroline Brayer; Remillard, Janine; D'Olier, Jordan HThis study explored how teachers interpreted and responded to their own student work during the process of formative assessment. The study involved a purposefully selected sample of 32 teachers in grades K-5 who had been trained by the Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) to use learning progressions to analyze and respond to evidence in student work. Since formative assessment is fundamentally an interpretive process, involving continually eliciting and interpreting evidence of student thinking from student work in order to inform teaching and learning (Black & Wiliam, 2009), the study analyzed data collected through semi-structured interviews. The study found variations in the way teachers make sense of their student work for formative assessment that were related to their underlying goals for student learning. Teachers with an achievement orientation tended to focus on performance goals: giving formative assessment items to gauge student performance on problems that reflected what had recently been taught and focused on singular or multiple components of performance to make a binary judgment (i.e. students who “get it or don’t get it”). Teachers with a learning orientation gave items to learn more about what students were able to do on different types of problems and focused on student strategies as an indicator of underlying understanding and development. These orientations also had implications for the instructional response teachers developed; as teachers looked beyond surface features of student work and binary distinctions, they developed more differentiated responses that built on students’ knowledge and their ability to develop more sophisticated understanding. In between these two extremes, we found three categories of hybrid approaches to formative assessment, demonstrating a push-and-pull between achievement and learning orientations at different decision points during the steps of the formative assessment process. Those decision points – the teachers’ purpose in giving an item, the evidence focused on, the interpretive framework used to analyze the evidence, and the focus of the instructional responses – offer multiple footholds in the formative assessment process where teachers can begin to try out new approaches that reflect a shift in orientation to student learning. The study shows that using formative assessment is not simply a matter of taking up new practices and using new tools. The variations in understanding and use of the ideas that were offered in professional development, as reflected in teachers’ actual practices, suggests that it is important to provide opportunities for sustained learning and supported use over time.Publication Experimental Impacts of the Ongoing Assessment Project on Teachers and Students(2018-10-10) Supovitz, Jonathan A; Ebby, Caroline B; Remillard, Janine; Nathenson, Robert AIn this report, we describe the results of a rigorous two-year study of the impacts of a mathematics initiative called Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) on teacher and student learning in grades 3-5 in two Philadelphia area school districts. OGAP is a mathematics program which combines teacher formative assessment practices with knowledge of student developmental progressions to build deeper student understanding of mathematics content. OGAP includes teacher professional development, classroom resources, school-based routines for regular practice, and ongoing school-based supports. The study was conducted in 61 schools during the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years, with OGAP randomly assigned to 31 schools and the remaining 30 serving as comparison sites. The results of this study showed that OGAP produced meaningful impacts on both teacher knowledge and student learning.Publication “Teaching Them How to Fish”: Learning to Learn and Teach Responsively(2021-01-01) Ebby, Caroline B; Hess, Brittany; Pecora, Lizzy; Valerio, JenniferThe Responsive Math Teaching (RMT) project’s 3-year model for professional development introduces teachers to a new instructional model through a full year of monthly Math Circles, where they experience problem solving and productive struggle from the student perspective while working through challenging open-ended tasks, engaging in mathematical discussions, and reflecting on the process. This paper examines teachers’ views of what they learned from this experience and how it affected both their instructional practices and their visions of mathematics teaching and learning. This study focused on a group of 34 participants from a network of urban elementary schools who attended monthly after school sessions over the course of one academic year. We highlight key findings in relation to (1) what teachers learned from engaging in solving challenging math tasks as learners, (2) key elements of their developing visions of mathematics teaching and learning, (3) changes they reported to their math instruction. The evidence suggests that by the end of the introductory year, teachers were primed and ready to learn new skills and practices to help bring their developing visions into practice in the classroom.Publication TASK Technical Report(2013-10-01) Ebby, Caroline Brayer; Sirinides, Philip M; Supovitz, Jonathan A; Oettinger, AndreaThis report reviews the development, piloting, and preliminary results from the large-scale field trial of the TASK Instrument (see cpre.org/task). In the first section, we review the need for an assessment of teachers’ capacity for learning trajectory-oriented instruction and the theoretical foundations that inform our work. We then describe the instrument and its development. Next, we detail the scoring process and the training of raters. The final section contains the analysis of the large-scale field trial conducted in 2012–13. We conclude with some directions for future work with this instrument.Publication Enactment of Lessons from a Technology-Based Curriculum: The Role of Instructional Practices in Students’ Opportunity to Learn(2018-03-31) Ebby, Caroline Brayer; Sirinides, Philip; Fink, RyanDigital tools and technology-based activities offer new and promising opportunities for students to actively explore mathematical concepts and ideas in ways supported by current reforms and visions of mathematics instruction. This report provides an in-depth look at the implementation of SunBay Digital Mathematics (SunBay Math) during the second year of an i3 validation project, in two large Florida districts. SunBay Math is a set of middle-school curriculum replacement units centered on the use of technology-based, dynamically linked representations to learn core mathematical concepts. We focus specifically on patterns and relationships between instructional practices and instructional quality in 26 videotaped lesson enactments that were purposefully collected to represent variation in implementation.