Monitoring student learning: Pre-Unit, Critical Juncture, and End-of-Unit assessments

At several key moments in each unit, assessment opportunities are designed to provide individualized information about student progress: the Pre-Unit, the Critical Juncture(s), and the End- of-Unit assessments. Each unit begins with a Pre-Unit Assessment, which is an individually scorable assessment opportunity meant to reveal students’ prior knowledge and preconceptions, and gauge their facility for using the SEPs and CCCs. Guidance is provided to support teachers to use entry-level assessment information to monitor and support progress along the unit’s Progress Build. Additional guidance is provided early in each unit to make use of students’ demonstrations of facility with SEPs and CCCs to guide instructional decisions and determine modifications for students. The Pre-Unit Assessment also offers a baseline from which to measure growth over the course of the unit.

Each unit also features one or several prominent formative assessment opportunities called a Critical Juncture. Occurring at the end of each chapter in K–5 or toward the midpoint of each unit in grades 6–8, the Critical Junctures (CJ) help teachers to ensure all students are at the necessary Progress Build level before moving on to the next lessons of the unit. Based on student performance on the assessment, teachers have access to recommendations for targeted student interventions, suggested follow ups, or for differentiating classroom instruction. In grades 6–8, student performance on the CJ drives auto-grouping for the differentiated, adaptive learning experiences in the lesson that follows.

Each unit concludes with a summative End-of-Unit Assessment, scored with the same diagnostic model of the Pre-Unit Assessment. Because these two assessments are similarly formatted and target the same learning goals, they provide a clear way to document student learning outcomes over a given unit. Also providing summative information about student understanding in grades 6–8 units are the written scientific arguments students produce in conjunction with the Science Seminar for each unit. As a three-dimensional performance task to complement the End-of-Unit Assessment, student writing is scored using a provided rubric. One rubric attends to student conceptual understanding. The other rubric formatively assesses students’ developing facility with the practice of constructing scientific arguments and explanations.

Illuminating student thinking: Unobtrusive embedded assessments

In addition to the Pre-Unit, Critical Juncture, and End-of-Unit assessments, each unit also includes a range of formative assessments embedded in instruction. By leveraging the formative opportunities in the learning experiences that students are already engaged in, these assessments are designed to provide regular information to the teacher with minimal impact on instructional time. These embedded assessment opportunities are smaller in scale than the more formal assessments described above and often highlight individual concepts or practices.

On-the-Fly Assessments (OTFAs) are three-dimensional formative assessment opportunities integrated throughout the lessons, designed to help a teacher make sense of student activity during a learning experience (e.g., student-to-student talk, writing, model construction) and provide evidence of how a student is coming to understand core concepts and developing dexterity with SEPs and CCCs. Each OTFA provides a description of how a student might demonstrate understanding of a concept and/or practice through the activity. Each OTFA includes “Look for” and “Now what?” sections to guide teacher use of assessment information. The “Look for” section provides a description of how a student might demonstrate understanding of a concept and/or practice through the activity (and, where appropriate, what evidence of common alternate conception or preconception would entail). Importantly, the “Now what?” section provides specific instructional suggestions for what to do in response to the assessment information gathered, and, where possible, highlights existing resources and opportunities within the unit for additional practice with the relevant ideas.

Another set of tools to help illuminate student thinking, and to support student metacognition, are Student Self-Assessments. Reviewing students’ responses to these self-assessments provides teachers a sense of what students believe about what they know. The questions and comments students record can also provide insight into what concepts students may need additional support on, what they are curious about, and/or what they are interested in.

Multidimensional performances of understanding

The assessment system is grounded in the principle that students benefit from regular and varied opportunities to demonstrate understanding through performance. In practice, this means that for the overwhelming majority of assessment opportunities in each unit, student conceptual understanding is revealed through engagement in the SEPs. This commitment to multidimensional performance is also clear in the embedded assessment opportunities that occur in nearly every lesson: students investigate phenomena, construct scientific explanations, develop and use models, and engage in argument as a core part of the problem-based deep dives in each unit. Careful consideration is given to ensure that each unit includes multiple opportunities to provide evidence of understanding of the focal concepts and practices in a given unit, as well as instructional suggestions for taking action based on that evidence.