ABSTRACT

Although the promotion of students’ language proficiency is an objective of all school subjects, many physics teachers self-evidently expect their students to apply sophisticated language repertoires. We assume that this expectation affects how physics teachers assess students’ texts in a classroom assessment. More precisely, we suppose that physics teachers confound students’ achievements in terms of content and language. To our knowledge, there is hardly any research about the role of language in physics teachers’ everyday assessment practices. Thus, to verify our supposition, we conducted an exploratory mixed-method study with 21 German in-service physics teachers. To collect valid empirical data, we asked the participants to assess a selection of four answers to a short essay question written by secondary school students. The four texts were chosen with systematically varied quality in terms of content and language (from low to high). The teachers were asked to think aloud while assessing the students’ texts. Moreover, we conducted post-interviews with the teachers and challenged them to perform pairwise comparisons of the four students’ texts. The verbal reports of each participant were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using multiple techniques (i.e., qualitative content analysis and non-parametric statistics). In summary, the most plausible interpretation of our exploratory findings is that the teachers in our study moderately confound content-related and language-related students’ achievements. Finally, the implications of this finding for science education research and science teacher education are outlined.

摘要

尽管提高学生的语言能力是所有学校科目的目标，但许多物理教师不言而喻地希望他们的学生能够应用复杂的语言曲目。我们假设这种期望会影响物理教师在课堂评估中评估学生课文的方式。更准确地说，我们假设物理教师在内容和语言方面混淆了学生的成就。据我们所知，几乎没有任何关于语言在物理教师日常评估实践中的作用的研究。因此，为了验证我们的假设，我们对 21 名德国在职物理教师进行了探索性混合方法研究。为了收集有效的实证数据，我们要求参与者评估中学生写的一篇短文问题的四个答案。这四篇文章在内容和语言（从低到高）方面系统地选择了不同的质量。老师们被要求在评估学生的课文时大声思考。此外，我们还对教师进行了后采访，并要求他们对四名学生的课文进行成对比较。每个参与者的口头报告都被录音、转录，并使用多种技术（即定性内容分析和非参数统计）进行分析。总之，对我们的探索性发现最合理的解释是，我们研究中的教师适度混淆了与内容相关和与语言相关的学生的成就。最后，概述了这一发现对科学教育研究和科学教师教育的影响。