Conference: Culturally Sustaining Approaches to Science and Engineering Classroom Assessments

Science and engineering teaching and curriculum have begun to engage learners’ knowledge of themselves, their communities, and their experiences of science and engineering. This knowledge can make the experience of learning science and engineering more meaningful and impactful as learners can see greater connections between the content and how their own experiences and communities. Teachers are able to build learning experiences that bring joy, wonder, and enthusiasm into the science learning environment. However, assessment approaches for documenting and presenting what learners’ know have typically not been able to sufficiently represent the new approaches to teaching and learning. This conference brings together researchers, school leaders, and teachers to develop frameworks and resources for making culturally sustaining approaches to teaching and learning science and engineering. Culturally sustaining approaches to assessment build on learners’ repertoires of practice, to embrace what they know and can do as well as who they are, to build on community knowledge and epistemologies, and to engage all the intellectual and linguistic resources they bring to learning environments. The conference workshop would seek to address two challenges in advancing the theory and practice of culturally sustaining approaches to assessments within in and out-of-school settings: (a) conceptualizing the notion of culturally sustaining approaches to assessments by drawing upon a robust body of research in science education, engineering education, classroom assessment, and the learning sciences, and (2) generating a range of images and examples of culturally sustaining approaches to assessments that embody the concept. The workshop will focus on impacting scholarship in culturally sustaining assessment while simultaneously focusing on practical applications. The workshop will bring together researchers, school-based leaders, teachers, and other interested groups in forming approaches that will better support students’ learning. This project is funded by the Discovery Research PreK-12 program. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.