How Can Features of Classroom Activity Systems Center Students' Ideas and Experiences in Formative Assessment? A Study of Sensemaking and Answer-Making Frames

Current reforms in science education envision students making sense of real-world phenomena in ways that leverage their ideas, experiences, and identities. Formative assessment is essential to this vision; however, we are still coming to understand how formative assessment design and enactment in classroom activity systems can support this vision. We present a framework for bringing the epistemological frames of sensemaking and answer-making and formative assessment together and use this to investigate students’ opportunities to make sense of phenomena during one teacher’s enactment of a formative assessment task for modeling energy in a biological system. Findings indicate that students had opportunities to share and leverage their personal connections and initial ideas through a sensemaking frame as the teacher interspersed and strategically leveraged answer-making moments. This case study illustrates how classrooms can frame students’ ideas and prior experiences as epistemic resources to be leveraged through the enactment of formative assessment.