Nice article that covers both the elementary and middle school tasks, thanks for sharing Dan! The middle school physical science task in Figure 1 really showcases the opportunities of technology-enhanced assessments, integrating a video of the experimental materials and procedure with an interactive graphing tool for students to visualize the provided data.

Why did you choose to include one trial with unknown mass and how does the graphing tool handle that trial?

The goal is to provide an opportunity for students to generate a data visualization that would help them answer a question. Where there is an unknown mass, CODAP (the graphing tool) will just not plot a point (as it is not possible without both coordinate values), so students see the rest of the data on a scatterplot and must interpolate to provide evidentiary support for their understanding of the relationship between mass, velocity, and kinetic energy.

Wow, sounds interesting! What approaches have you taken to weave in multiple modalities? 

One of the biggest challenges we face over and over again is time! Developing quality assessments requires a principled approach with consistent documentation and methods for evaluating their validity and utility. We use a multi-step, iterative and collaborative process that involves individuals with diverse perspectives and experiences. We have a great team of collaborators that we have been building this community and developing assessments for two years. I think this model of collaborative and distributed development is one that has potential to be adapted for many communities of teachers and educators. 

Another challenge, especially with NGSS, is developing multi-dimensional rubrics that can help teachers evaluate student responses and provide feedback to students along those multiple dimensions.

 

I agree that your project sounds super interesting, Dionne. We'd love to hear more about it.

I've been spending some time thinking about how turned off our Black and Brown students and teachers have been by traditional standardized assessments -- even as newer fields like CS/CT Ed seem to be hurtling towards that very thing.

Maybe with the disruption of COVID-19, we can act to further alleviate the disproportionate harm cause by traditional assessments and develop scalable versions of assessments that actually help our teachers and students.

 

Thanks Nonye, it has been nice to continue and build on the lessons learned from when we were working together to develop assessments for the middle school life science standards!

Kevin, we'd love to chat with you more about building teacher capacity in this area! One aspect of the project that is still under development is creating a virtual learning community to connect teachers around this topic. You can also see the first set of tasks on the Next Generation Science Assessments portal's elementary tasks page.

Remy, we have been very inspired by our teacher collaborators as well! We love working with them!

As you noted, elementary teachers are often on their own for science curriculum planning. That was part of our reasoning for designing the tasks to be curriculum-neutral. The teacher collaborators have been a great source of first-hand experience in terms of where they are looking for lesson and unit resources, how assessment tasks like these fit in, and what supports are most useful to teachers. Due to COVID-19, we were unfortunately not able to observe any of the assessments in action this year. Some teachers were able to implement some tasks in their virtual and/or hybrid teaching, though, and we have gotten great feedback from them that we are using during the revision process. We are hopefully that we'll be able to do a lot of observations next year!

Hi Sabrina, thanks for asking this! The first set of tasks were only recently released for public use on the Next Generation Science Assessments portal's elementary tasks page, so we don't yet have any information about international use. It is definitely something we should keep track of, though, thank you for the idea!

Hi Sabrina, adding to Liz's response:

While the elementary tasks are brand new, the middle schools tasks have been available for several years and they do have some data on international use or access (I'll see if I can dig it up). We definitely think that science educators across the world will find these assessment tasks valuable because they let students use science practices (e.g., developing a quantitative model, analyzing and interpreting data, asking useful questions, etc.) to work with their science ideas and concepts (e.g., life cycles of plants and animals, forces and motion, etc.). 

Your other question about adapting the assessments is an interesting one as well! One of the ways we are seeing teachers adapting the tasks is through the way they use the tasks with their students. Because these tasks are designed to support teachers' instruction in their day-to-day teaching, teachers can build them more authentically into their classroom learning environment. Many are not using them as a "quiz" that students do silently at their desks. Instead, teachers may have students act out a portion of the scenario, they may follow up the task the next day with a classroom demonstration to extend students' thinking, they might assign pairs/groups to work on one task, or complete the task as a group. We're looking forward to working with teachers over the next two years to better support all these use cases and more!