Keely - Classroom Assessment Probes

The discussions this week have centered largely around student misconceptions and formative assessment. Before reading this article and participating in these discussions, though, I viewed formative assessment as more of a close cousin of summative assessment than a tool for teaching. The Keely article shook that philosophy from me. "Probes...'turn the spotlight from examining students' work to examining teachers' work'....In other words, they help you understand student thinking so that you can develop more effective ways of teaching" (Keely, 8).

One part of that passage stood out to me above the rest: that probes help teachers understand student thinking. These assessments do tell us as teachers what our students know and what they do not, but I had never thought of them as a tool for actually getting inside the minds of our students and attempting to understand why  students believe what they believe. This, of course, leads to decisions on future curricula and helps shape the plan of action of the teacher. What do I need to focus on specifically that will maximize student potential, that will shake away these misconceptions? What teaching practices will my students benefit from the most, based on the responses to these probes? These are questions that could be answered when a formative probe is assessed and interpreted by a teacher.

But the probes do not only help the teacher form his or her plans - they help the students as well. The article described it as such:

"Teachers need to engage students in sharing [their] ideas if students are to understand science. One way to begin this engagement is to provide a probe and ask students to write down their ideas in response to the prompt. Writing a response to the prompt is one method of making students' thinking visible and engaging them in the ideas they will be learning about. At the same time it encourages your students to pay careful attention to the reasoning they use to support their ideas" (Keely, 8).

This was so important to me as a teacher to understand because it sheds light to the function of these probes as not only a tool for thinking and learning (for both teachers and students), but as a way to encourage critical thinking and supportive reasoning skills within students. When this is put into practice frequently, students begin to mold their ways of responding to assessments. They learn how to articulate an opinion, to think about why they respond in certain ways - to support their scientific (or not-so-scientific) reasoning. This article has certainly given me insight as to how to develop my teaching in ways that can help myself and my students better understand scientific concepts.