Formative Assessment Strategies by Monitoring Science Students’ Problem-Solving Skill Development

To be able to support students’ competence development in solving physics problems over the course of a lesson series effectively, teachers need a proper appreciation of students’ deficiencies. As teachers commonly assess students’ competence by means of written tests, teachers are challenged to interpret students’ work on these tests and to intervene when some students fail to understand the proper application of solution methods in different contexts. This paper evaluates a formative assessment practice where teachers have been instructed to pinpoint students’ level of understanding of kinematics problems by means of a cognitive diagnostic instrument and to provide personalized hints that match students’ current level of understanding. The study is novel in this sense that the assessment of written tests results of students’ problem solving is not expressed in grades and pass rates, but in terms of cognitive level of understanding. The results show that teachers can determine and monitor shifts of performance of students’ cognitive level of understanding by using this instrument. Second, the results indicate that among students with low initial results, the group that received sufficient feedback via sticky notes made significantly more progress in solving problems than the group that did not receive feed forward on sticky notes. Third, the timing of feedback in the form of sticky notes did not affect on students’ progress in achieving mastery at the end of the instruction period. Our conclusion of this study is: Cognition develops through levels and tiers and support is essential to move to the Zone of Proximal Development. Subsequently, we evaluate group and subgroup implications for didactic interventions and propose suggestions for further investigations.