Novice Teacher Learning and Motivation Across Contexts: Assessment Tools as Boundary Objects

Abstract

Abstract We present a longitudinal study of novice teachers’ appropriation, negotiation, and recontextualization of assessment tools and practices. During the four years of the study, we observed and interviewed beginning mathematics and social studies teachers, along with their colleagues, mentors, and supervisors, from their time in a graduate secondary teacher education program through their second year of professional teaching. Analysis of fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and artifacts suggests that assessment tools function as boundary objects in negotiations within and between the social worlds in which novices learn to teach. Boundary objects serve as reifications or representations of values, goals, and meanings (CitationBowker & Star, 1999; CitationStar & Griesemer, 1989; CitationWenger, 1998). Assessment tools and artifacts, as boundary objects, facilitate engagement of teachers, administrators, students, and their families in coordinating activity across social boundaries and are central to the function of educational organizations. Novice teachers’ motivation to learn promoted assessment tools and their affiliated practices changed as they crossed boundaries between university and school and changed positions from student teacher to newcomer to experienced novice. Implications of this analysis for understanding novice teacher learning and motivation, and for assessment policy more broadly, are discussed. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank the teachers, their mentors, and their students for their generous participation in this research. The research on which this article is based was supported by a Teachers for a New Era grant to the University of Washington from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Ford Foundation, and the Annenberg Foundation. In addition, a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation supported the second author. The statements and views expressed are solely those of the authors. An earlier version of the article was presented at the European Association for Learning & Instruction biennial meeting, August 2009, Amsterdam. Notes This term emerged from our data emically early on, as novices frequently invoked the “real world” as a figurative place in their imagined development. Grades might also be classified as a different kind of object, common boundaries. Star and Greisemer (1989) describe common boundaries as “common objects which have the same boundaries but different internal contents” (p. 411). In the sense that different teachers use different means to derive grades but use a common system of marks (i.e., A, B, 4.0, 3.5). Abe's final observation and interview by his methods instructor (the second author) was the sole exception to this rule. The International Baccalaureate program (IB) is an honors program taught in many schools around the world. The program includes taking more demanding coursework and a series of standardized examinations in several subject areas. Here the position of the interviewer as a co-author of the assessment textbook used in TEPworld enters into the negotiation of values in the interview context. Karl positions himself as still not in alignment with what he perceives as the shared value for rubric use of his administrator and the researcher. Of course, this interpretation assumes that negotiating common assessments would have improved teachers’ collective assessment practice. Brett's position as a newcomer and relatively novice teacher in those negotiations, however, might indeed have threatened his autonomy to use what he saw as appropriate assessment practices. In this sense his withdrawal from those negotiations was strategic. Interestingly, our attempts to implement these suggestions in our revised teacher education program have uncovered a lack of attention to teaching novices how to interpret the results of the assessments they use. In part, this reflects the fact that the meaning of performances is negotiated in figured worlds of schools and communities (see Gemma's discussion with her colleague about interpreting IB exam scores). But in part this reflects the separation in most teacher education programs of opportunities to learn to use assessment tools from their use in practice to inform decisions about learning and instruction.