Formative Assessment Requires Artistic Vision
Margaret Macintyre Latta
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Gayle Buck
Indiana University–Bloomington
April Beckenhauer
Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Florida
Citation: Macintyre Latta, M.; Buck, G. & Beckenhauer, A. (2007). Formative
assessment requires artistic vision.
International Journal of Education & the
Arts, 8(4). Retrieved [date] from http://www.ijea.org/v8n4/.
Abstract
This two-year study focused on the lived terms of inquiry in
middle-school science classrooms. The conditions that enable teachers
to see and act on science learning as ongoing inquiry were deliberately
sought in Year 2. Nine science teachers participated in search of
capacities connecting curriculum, teaching, and assessment for greater
student and teacher inquiry. An online logbook chronicled this search,
serving as a dialogic medium revealing a movement of teachers seeking
out and seizing back possibilities for teaching and learning in relation to
the given realities of classrooms. The nature and role of formative
assessments in support of learning were encountered as the obstacle to
be worked out in teachers' practical action. The necessary interpretive
eye and capacity to act in accordance with the dynamic character of
formative assessments became the task at hand for teachers and
researchers. This task demanded artistic teaching visions, attending to
the creation of student meaning on an individual and collective basis.
The difficulty, alongside the necessity, of educating artistic teaching
visions offered glimpses into how formative assessment use holds
potential to restore the participatory dynamic integral to learning. The
philosophical/theoretical ground of arts based educational research was
found to offer much potential to science inquiry, linking processproduct-
learner in support of formative assessment use and offering
implications for a participatory mode of professional development.
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