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This study supports the work of Black and Wiliam (1998), who demonstrated that when teachers effectively utilize formative assessment strategies, student learning increases significantly. However, the researchers also found a "poverty of practice" among teachers, in that few fully understood how to implement classroom formative assessment. This qualitative case study examined a series of voluntary workshops offered at one middle school designed to address this poverty of practice. Data were gathered via semi-structured interviews. These research questions framed the study: (1) What role did a professional learning community structure play in shaping workshop participants' perceived effectiveness of a voluntary formative assessment initiative? (2) How did this initiative affect workshop participants' perceptions of their knowledge of formative assessment and differentiation strategies? (3) How did it affect workshop participants' perceptions of their abilities to teach others about formative assessment and differentiated instruction? (4) How did it affect school-wide use of classroom-level strategies? Results indicated that teacher workshop participants experienced a growth in their capacity to use and teach others various formative assessment strategies, and even non-participating teachers reported greater use of formative assessment in their own instruction. Workshop participants and non-participating teachers perceived little growth in the area of differentiation of instruction, which contradicted some administrator perceptions.

In collaboration with two other research organizations, the authors integrate principles of the BEAR Assessment System with Universal Design for Learning principles to develop and validate learning progressions and an aligned, universally designed formative and summative classroom assessment system for promoting conceptual understanding of number sense/operations for students with Math Learning Disabilities (MLD). This research will help to create an effective and validated formative assessment system for meaningfully and validly diagnosing and promoting student learning outcomes on constructs central to number sense and operations for whole numbers up to and including elementary fractions. The assessment system will offer a powerful tool that will provide teachers cutting edge research and empirically based resources for validly monitoring student knowledge and progress, meaningfully interpreting evidence about student learning from formative assessments (including what students know and do not know about the target constructs), and successfully using formative data to adjust subsequent instruction. These tools will enable teachers to intervene with students who are struggling mathematically. Although developed specifically for students with learning disabilities in math, the system will be useful to all those who seek ways to assess and enhance students' conceptual understanding of early foundational math and facilitate access to STEM content for diverse student populations. (Contains 1 footnote.)

The need for a scientifically-literate American population has gained great prominence on the educational landscape of priorities over the past decade; young children will be increasingly exposed to the STEM fields and encouraged to excel in these areas. Professional development is key to assuring that early childhood teachers provide children with cognitively-challenging early learning experiences. Focusing on the Head Start community, "Foundations of Science Literacy" (FSL) is a credit-bearing professional development course that directly addresses the achievement gap in early science education. The program not only addresses an urgent need, it also integrates the resources, structure, and support that preschool teachers need to improve early science learning and teaching. First, based on data from an efficacy study nearing completion, the authors assess whether "FSL without" embedded formative assessments leads to gains in preschool children. Second, drawing on insights from a new development project, the authors describe how instruction-embedded formative assessment can be used to "strengthen" and "clarify" the relation between gains in teacher pedagogical content knowledge and gains in children's scientific thinking. For the efficacy study, FSL was implemented in the greater New York City area and the population included preschool teachers and a sample of children in their classrooms using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design. The authors highlight a promising approach to learning from mixed (summative) results using formative assessment to provide more nuanced information about children's learning over time and to allow teachers to tailor instruction so that it is more effective. One figure is appended.