With the FACETS project, Education Development Center, Inc. is developing and testing a 2-year, intensive professional development model for building middle grades mathematics teachers' facility with formative assessment. Using a combination of institutes, ongoing professional learning communities, and web-based resources, this model attends both to teachers' knowledge of critical aspects of formative assessment and their implementation of formative assessment in the classroom. Implementation consists of teachers integrating practices associated with critical aspects of formative assessment into mathematics instruction on a daily basis; full implementation, which the project is working towards, requires internalizing a comprehensive understanding of these aspects. The project has two rounds of professional development: a pilot version with a first cohort of 40 teachers and a revised, field test version with a second cohort of 60 teachers. The audience for the FACETS project is middle school math teachers including special education teachers who are responsible for some math instruction, professional development providers, and the research community.
The main research questions are: 1) How do mathematics teachers' knowledge and practice of formative assessment change as a result of participation in the proposed professional development? 2) What learning trajectory describes teachers' developing knowledge and practice of formative assessment, and what common barriers are associated with different parts of that trajectory?
The project is collecting evidence of teachers' learning at a number of different points during the 2-year professional development experience. Teachers' understanding and use of six critical aspects of formative assessment will be assessed before, during, and after the professional development sessions though a series of surveys and questionnaires. In addition, the project will use classroom observations for a sub-sample of participants to chart changes in classroom practices over the course of the professional development.
Data related to barriers and challenges to teachers' understanding and implementation of formative assessment come from teachers' survey responses as well as from classroom observations and observations of professional development activities. These data inform modifications to the pilot version of the professional development and drive the larger set of revisions for the field test version. The data also inform the articulation of the participants' learning trajectories and provide value to the mathematics education and formative assessment research communities.
Deliverables include a model of professional development for the learning of formative assessment in mathematics, a facilitator's guide describing the components of the professional development model and suggestions for using the model to provide a professional development program, cyberlearning products such as interactive forums, video and other materials for the professional development activities and resource library, and journal articles describing teachers' learning trajectory for implementing formative assessment in middle grades mathematics classrooms.
External evaluation of this project is carried out by Char Associates.
