Classroom Assessment for Emergent Learning

Abstract

The prevailing formative assessment framework is built on the argument that assessment is an adaptive, inferential, agentic process – that classroom assessment is not an event or chain of events, but an iterative process that unfolds in specific shifting contexts. Yet classroom assessment also occurs in the shadow of assessment systems steeped in measurement, standardization, accountability, and grades-as-objective-truth. This conceptual cross-wiring emphasizes the need for a coherent framework that provides the vocabulary and analytical attention to the adaptive processes that occur when teachers, students, and other agents interact – when they teach, learn, and assess. In this dissertation, I assert that complexity thinking and emergent learning offer just such a framework, offering insights into classroom assessment as an adaptive process and the limitations of a view that teaching or assessment cause learning. I therefore leveraged a two-phase multicase action research project to study how teachers provoke and support emergent learning through formative classroom assessment. In the first phase of the study, I interviewed 12 classroom teachers who described their approaches to formative classroom assessment and what formative assessment conditions may facilitate emergent learning in specific contexts. In the second phase, I partnered with 3 of these teachers to conduct multi-week action research projects, examining how they and their students interacted, iterated, and adapted their approaches over time. Through these data, I identified six enabling conditions to provoke and support emergent learning: (1) flexibility, adaptability, and iteration; (2) mutual trust and student agency; (3) valuing learning as a shared, ongoing process; (4) anchored pedagogies; (5) equity in context; and (6) joy and confidence. The findings contribute to a growing body of empirical evidence of emergent learning processes and may support explicit teacher professional learning toward complex coherent approaches to classroom assessment.