Building Connections to Teach the Nature of Science: An Experienced Science Teacher's Formative Assessment Practices in a High School Classroom

Abstract

While understanding the nature of science (NOS) is recognized as a key component of science education because of its potential benefits in nurturing scientific literacy, there is currently limited knowledge on how NOS learning can be supported by teachers' ongoing, in-the-moment assessment in the classroom. This study explores the value of formative assessment as a vehicle to facilitate reflective instruction of the NOS, through building connections between NOS and other related components of science learning. We closely examined one experienced science teacher's lessons on the development of scientific knowledge in a 10th grade science classroom, along with the teacher's post-lesson reflections and classroom artifacts, with a focus on how the teacher planned and orchestrated whole-class discussions following student group presentations. We identify four distinct strategies for formative assessment the teacher enacted in an effort to create “teachable moments” for NOS learning: multicontextualizing NOS, mapping examples to NOS, focusing discussion on NOS, and exploring different aspects of NOS. Across the lessons, while some teacher moves prompted discursive exchanges, others revealed significant challenges and were often met with student silence. Our work uses formative assessment as a lens to reveal the complexities and in-the-moment challenges of NOS instruction, illustrating how even an experienced teacher can struggle to facilitate these conversations. We argue that NOS research should pay more attention to the potential of formative assessment and the need for professional development to support teachers with empirically grounded assessment tasks for use in NOS instruction.