EdTPA Glossary

Secondary Science Glossary

• academic language: Oral and written language used for academic purposes. Academic language is the means by which students develop and express content understandings. Academic language represents the language of the discipline that students need to learn and use to participate and engage in the content area in meaningful ways. There are language demands that teachers need to consider as they plan to support student learning of content. These language demands include language functions, vocabulary, discourse, and syntax.

• language demands: Specific ways that academic language (functions, vocabulary and/or symbols, syntax, discourse) is used by students to participate in learning tasks through reading, writing, listening, and/or speaking to demonstrate their disciplinary understanding.

• language functions: The content and language focus of the learning task, represented by the active verbs within the learning outcomes. Common language functions in science include analyzing scientific data; interpreting written investigative procedures, diagrams, figures, tables, graphs, and dense authoritative text; explaining models of scientific phenomena; predicting from models and data from scientific inquiries; justifying conclusions with scientific evidence; and so on.

• vocabulary: Includes words and phrases that are used within disciplines including: (1) words and phrases with subject-specific meanings that differ from meanings used in everyday life (e.g., table); (2) general academic vocabulary used across disciplines (e.g., compare, analyze, evaluate); and (3) subject-specific words defined for use in the discipline.13

• discourse: Discourse includes the structures of written and oral language, as well as how members of the discipline talk, write, and participate in knowledge construction. Discipline-specific discourse has distinctive features or ways of structuring oral or written language (text structures) that provide useful ways for the content to be communicated.14 In science, language structures include symbolic representations such as chemical equations (which can be translated into words), graphic and tabular representations (which are shorthand language for complex sets of data), lists (e.g., materials lists), and narrative (e.g., analysis and conclusion sections in a lab report). If the function is to draw conclusions, then appropriate structures could include charts of investigative results or sentence starters to structure an analysis such as “The results of the investigation show...,” “This data suggests that....”

• syntax: The set of conventions for organizing symbols, words, and phrases together into structures (e.g., sentences, graphs, tables).

• language supports: The scaffolds, representations, and pedagogical strategies teachers provide to help learners understand, use, and practice the concepts and language they need to learn within disciplines (Santos, Darling-Hammond, Cheuk, 2012).16 The language supports planned within the lessons in edTPA should directly support learners to understand and use identified language demands (function, vocabulary and/or symbols, syntax or discourse) to deepen content understandings.

• artifacts: Authentic work completed by you and your students including lesson plans, copies of instructional and assessment materials, video clips of your teaching, and student work samples. Artifacts are submitted as part of your evidence.

• assessment (formal and informal): “[R]efer[s] to all those activities undertaken by teachers and by their students . . . that provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities.”17 Assessments provide evidence of students’ prior knowledge, thinking, or learning in order to evaluate what students understand and how they are thinking. Some examples of informal assessments are student questions and responses during instruction and teacher observations of students as they work or perform. Some examples of formal assessments are quizzes, homework assignments, lab reports, journals, projects, and performance tasks.

• assets (knowledge of students):

  • personal: refers to specific background information that students bring to the learning environment. Students may bring interests, knowledge, everyday experiences, family backgrounds, and so on, which a teacher can draw upon to support learning.

  • cultural: refers to the cultural backgrounds and practices that students bring to the learning environment, such as traditions, languages and dialects, worldviews, literature, art, and so on, that a teacher can draw upon to support learning.

  • community: refers to common backgrounds and experiences that students bring from the community where they live, such as resources, local landmarks, community events and practices, and so on, that a teacher can draw upon to support learning.

• central focus: A description of the important understandings and core concepts that you want students to develop within the learning segment. The central focus should go beyond a list of facts and skills or procedures, align with content standards and learning objectives, and address the subject-specific components in the learning segment. For example, the subject-specific components for secondary science are conceptual understanding, use of scientific practices during inquiry, and evidence-based explanations of or reasonable predictions about a real-world phenomenon. A central focus for the learning segment might be inheritance of traits. The learning segment would focus on conceptual understandings of genotypes, phenotypes, dominant genes, and so on, an investigation of how relationships between genotypes are expressed in phenotypes, and an explanation of how these relationships would affect distributions of phenotypes in a population.

• commentary: Submitted as part of each task and, along with artifacts, make up your evidence. The commentaries should be written to explain the rationale behind your teaching decisions and to analyze and reflect on what you have learned about your teaching practice and your students’ learning.

• data: Information that is collected during an experiment or investigation to better understand a real-world phenomenon or to evaluate a prediction. This includes quantitative data—such as temperature values, numbers of offspring, calculated relationships between variables from empirical investigations or mathematical models—or qualitative data—such as color changes, descriptions of crystal formation, descriptions of relationships between variables based on models or maps.

• engaging students in learning: Using instructional and motivational strategies that promote students’ active involvement in learning tasks that increase their knowledge, skills, and abilities related to specific learning objectives. Engagement in learning contrasts with student participation in learning tasks that are not well designed and/or implemented and do not increase student learning.

• evaluation criteria: Performance indicators or dimensions that are used to assess evidence of student learning. They indicate the qualities by which levels of performance can be differentiated and that anchor judgments about the learner’s degree of success on an assessment. Evaluation criteria can be represented in various ways, such as a rubric, a point system for different levels of performance, or rules for awarding full versus partial credit. Evaluation criteria may examine correctness/accuracy, cognitive complexity, sophistication or elaboration of responses, or quality of explanations.

• evidence (candidate): Consists of artifacts that document how you planned and implemented instruction AND commentaries that explain your plans and what is seen in the videorecording(s) or examine what you learned about your teaching practice and your students’ learning. Evidence should demonstrate your ability to design lesson plans with instructional supports that deepen student learning, use knowledge of your students to inform instruction, foster a positive learning environment that promotes student learning, monitor and assess student progress toward learning objectives, and analyze your teaching effectiveness. Your evidence must be submitted electronically using the electronic portfolio management system used by your teacher preparation program.

• evidence-based explanation: An evidence-based explanation of a phenomenon includes a claim (statement) about the underlying cause using scientific concepts or principle(s), consistent with scientific evidence and/or data.

• evidence (scientific): Information about the phenomenon from systematic observations or models (conceptual, mathematical, physical, and empirical). Evidence can be generated by the students or provided from a trustworthy source that provides some assurance that the evidence collected meets scientific standards. If mathematical models are used, the analysis should focus on patterns of relationships between variables and not solutions for problem sets. Examples of a variety of evidence include: geological maps; pressures and temperatures collected via computer simulation in gas law experimentation; photographs used in food web organization; length measurements of bacteria, nuclei, and mitrochondria using electron micrographs.

• learning environment: The designed physical and emotional context, established and maintained throughout the learning segment to support a positive and productive learning experience for students.

• learning objectives: Student learning outcomes to be achieved by the end of the lesson or learning segment.

• learning segment: A set of 3–5 lessons that build one upon another toward a central focus, with a clearly defined beginning and end.

• learning task: Includes activities, discussions, or other modes of participation that engage students to develop, practice, and apply skills and knowledge related to a specific learning goal. Learning tasks may be scaffolded to connect prior knowledge to new knowledge and often include formative assessment.

• patterns of learning: Includes both quantitative and qualitative patterns (or consistencies) for different groups of students or individuals. Quantitative patterns indicate in a numerical way the information understood from the assessment (e.g., 10 out of 15 students or 20% of the students). Qualitative patterns include descriptions of understandings, misunderstandings, and/or partial understandings that could explain the quantitative patterns (e.g., “given that most students were able to . . . it seems that they understand”).

• planned supports: Instructional strategies, learning tasks and materials, and other resources deliberately designed to facilitate student learning of the central focus.

• preconceptions: Student ideas about the physical and biological worlds and how they work or about the nature of science, based on their observations, experiences, and what they have heard.

• prior academic learning and prerequisite skills: Includes students’ content knowledge and skills as well as academic experiences developed prior to the learning segment.

• rapport: A close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups understand each other’s feelings or ideas and communicate well with each other.

• respect: A positive feeling of esteem or deference for a person and specific actions and conduct representative of that esteem. Respect can be a specific feeling of regard for the actual qualities of the one respected. It can also be conduct in accord with a specific ethic of respect. Rude conduct is usually considered to indicate a lack of respect, disrespect, whereas actions that honor somebody or something indicate respect. Note that respectful actions and conduct are culturally defined and may be context dependent.

• rubrics: Subject-specific evaluation criteria used to score your performance on edTPA. These rubrics are included in the handbook, following the directions for each task. The descriptors in the five-level rubrics address a wide range of performance, beginning with the knowledge and skills of a novice not ready to teach (Level 1) and extending to the advanced practices of a highly accomplished beginner (Level 5).

• scientific practices through inquiry: Scientific practices, as defined by the Next Generation Science Standards, focus on eight key components:

  • Asking questions

  • Developing and using models

  • Planning and carrying out investigations

  • Analyzing and interpreting data

  • Using mathematics and computational thinking

  • Constructing explanations

  • Engaging in argument from evidence

  • Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information

• variety of learners: Students in your class who may require different strategies or support. These students include but are not limited to students with IEPs or 504 plans, English language learners, struggling readers, underperforming students or those with gaps in academic knowledge, and/or gifted students.