The Exploding Pringles can design challenge is an open-ended formative assessment developed by the ACCT team, which tasks students with designing an explosion that produces the maximum boom within a Pringles container with a fixed volume.
Here you can read a description of the Structure-Property Relationships thread of the Chemical Thinking framework.
As physical distancing continues and we persist in teaching our chemistry classes online, it behooves us as teachers to spend some time considering how we can purposefully observe and decipher the written work that our students submit.
Here you can learn more about the ACCT project and the people involved.
The aim of the formative assessment enactment model is to offer a practical resource for teachers to support students’ sense making. The model was derived from rigorous analysis of classroom videos of experienced science teachers doing formative assessment activities with their students. The model offers a structure of how different kinds of teaching moves are enacted, as well as characterizes the overall structure of formative assessment that science teachers enact. Excellent science teachers have a broad repertoire and use all of these different kinds of teaching moves in different moments, depending on the in-the-moment purposes that teachers have which are shaped by knowing the specific students and the challenges they are facing at that moment, as well as in the context of the overall lesson purposes.
Teachers' use of formative assessment is widely known to improve student learning. However, teachers enact formative assessment in many ways. How can chemistry teachers be more versatile and intentional in how we enact formative assessment so that we can maximize student learning by increasing their opportunities to learn? Our ACCT research and professional development partnership is aimed at learning the answers to this, and providing resources for chemistry teachers to enact formative assessment in the most effective ways.
There are characteristic ways that middle and high school chemistry teachers pay attention to students' written work (noticing and interpreting) and plan on following up on what they interpret (acting). These can be organized as different "formative assessment personalities" that are approaches that are often taken by teachers, based on noticing/interpreting and on acting in either prescriptive or responsive ways. This article highlights four "personalities", focusing on the affordances that each personality could bring to a teaching moment. Making decisions based on which affordances we want to leverage in a particular moment with a certain student gives us the ability to be more intentional in deciding the teaching moves we use.
Check out some ACCT team members' blogs to learn more about enacting formative assessment.
Here you can explore publications from the Sevian lab related to chemical thinking-based learning.
Here you can explore publications from the Sevian lab related to students' chemical thinking. We are happy to share the results and products of our work. Please feel free to email us to request any papers you are interested in reading, if you are not able to obtain them from your library.
