Dustin Van Orman’s Three Minute Thesis
Preparing Teachers for Formative Assessment
Research has identified teachers’ prior experiences with assessment as a key influence in their own classroom assessment practices. These practices may affect student motivation, learning behaviors, emotions, and achievement. Preservice teacher education is considered an essential time for teachers to learn to use assessment as a positive force for learning: Formative assessment. In formative assessment, teachers plan and enact assessment opportunities with students during the process of learning and use information generated to adjust teaching and learning. It encompasses a wide range of practices and approaches that have been repeatedly demonstrated in research to improve the learning process with students, and ultimate outcomes. In my 3 minutes, I will describe two studies I am conducting that examine how teacher educators and teacher education programs can prepare preservice teachers for formative assessment, and the assessment orientations and rationale future teachers bring to teaching. In the first study, a systematic review, I examine hundreds of research studies on formative assessment in teacher education and describe outcomes for teacher candidates and their students. In the second study, preservice teachers from across the U.S. are being immersed in authentic dilemmas of classroom assessment practice to prompt their real-time thinking and decisions as a teacher. Based on their responses and stage in their preparation programs, a sample of preservice teachers are invited to an interview to share their orientations to teaching and assessment, and the rationale that informs their practices with students. Together, these studies will provide important insight for how teacher education programs may best support teachers’ development in using assessment as an essential tool to improve student learning.
About Dustin
Dustin Van Orman is a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology at Washington State University (WSU). His focus is on how effective assessment and teaching practices can be leveraged to enhance the learning process for students and build lifelong learning skills. This includes engagement with prospective and practicing teachers to build assessment literacy in planning, implementing, interpreting, evaluating, and using high-quality activities and results with students to drive learning. His dissertation work is focused on formative assessment practices used in teacher education and the formative classroom assessment literacy preservice teachers’ have and gain from their preparation for teaching. He currently teaches a classroom assessment course for secondary preservice teachers and is a Research Assistant in the Multimedia in Education: Research with Instructional Techniques (MERIT) Laboratory at WSU. Prior to coming to WSU, he served as an educator (pre-K-16) in the U.S. and China for 10 years in a variety of roles, including as a marine science, English, Spanish, and social studies teacher, and English teacher educator. He holds degrees in European Studies: Linguistics and Spanish (BA), and Sociology (BA) from Seattle Pacific University, and Applied Linguistics (MA) from the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China.
Dustin’s slide
