Using a case-study approach, we aim to understand how teachers interact with both analogue and digital resources in the science classroom for formative assessment (FA) purposes and their justifications for such interactions. The study was conducted in the context of a European Union project on FA in science and mathematics education. The case involved two Norwegian primary school teachers teaching their grades 5 and 7 students a series of science lessons on the topic “how to prevent microorganisms from spreading.” The data set consisted of lesson plans, classroom observations, pre- and post-interviews conducted with teachers, student tasks, post-interviews with students, and student work. We identified eight analogue and digital resources, which were used to employ five FA strategies. The strategies that were most commonly used related to “engineering effective classroom discussions” that elicited evidence of student understanding and “activating students” as autonomous learners and peer instructors. The teachers’ rationales for using the selected resources were mainly connected to their effectiveness, practicality, and relevance. Teacher interactions with the selected resources are described, and educational implications are discussed.

Studies have reported that students find geometric optics topics difficult partly because of representations in textbooks. In Ethiopia, textbooks are the main source of content in schools. Therefore, a study of how textbooks present certain topics can shed light on students’ learning difficulties. This study specifically examines how image formation–observation is presented in Ethiopian textbooks and how these representations might be the possible causes of students’ learning difficulties. Sixth-, eighth-, and tenth-grade physics textbook chapters containing topics related to image were analyzed. The analysis followed a directed approach to qualitative content analysis. The results show that textbooks sometimes contain explanations that explicitly clarify pictorials and are consistently integrated. However, the textbooks also contain implicit, missing, and incorrect verbal representations as well as incomplete, selective, and patterned pictorial representations that are presented inconsistently. Moreover, the textbooks rarely show alternative representations that complement the problematic representations, hence limiting their misinterpretations. Students may intuitively interpret implicit, selective, and patterned representations that may not conform to scientific concepts. Similarly, incorrect, missing, and incomplete representations could be seen as a direct source of students’ misconceptions. The results suggest that authors and teachers of optics textbooks should be aware of students’ learning difficulties because of representations and should emphasize alternative representations.