Assessments

Assessment opportunities include:

• Pre-Unit Assessment (formative): A combination of auto-scored multiple-choice questions and rubric-scored written responses.

• On-the-Fly Assessments (formative): Three-dimensional tasks integrated throughout the lessons. On-the-Fly Assessment opportunities are designed to help a teacher make sense of student activity during a learning experience (e.g., student-to-student talk, writing, model construction) and to provide evidence of how a student is coming to understand core concepts and developing dexterity with SEPs and CCCs.

• End-of-chapter assessments (formative): Variety of multidimensional performance tasks, intended to assess student progress, occurring at the end of each chapter. Examples include written scientific explanations, argumentation, developing and using models, and designing engineering solutions.

• Student Self-Assessments (formative): One per chapter; brief meta-cognitive opportunities for students to reflect on their own learning, ask questions, and reveal ongoing thoughts about unit content.

• Critical Juncture Assessment (CJ) (formative): Occurring toward the toward the midpoint of each unit, these help teachers to ensure all students are ready before moving on to a new phase of instruction.

• Grades 6–8 Science Seminar and final written argument (formative and summative components): Culminating performance task for each core unit where students are introduced to a new real-world problem, collect and analyze evidence, examine a number of claims, and then engage in a full-class discussion where they must state which claims are best supported by the evidence, all while making clear their reasoning that connects the evidence to the claims. After the seminar, students then individually write their final scientific argument, drawing on the DCIs, SEPs, and CCCs they have used over the course of the unit to develop a sophisticated and convincing argument that addresses the problem they’ve been investigating. Rubrics, scoring guides, and examples of student responses at each scoring level are provided to teachers to support the assessment of students’ understanding of concepts and specific practices.

• End-of-Unit Assessment (summative): Combination of auto-scored multiple-choice questions and rubric-scored written responses. Summative assessments for each unit are designed to provide valid, reliable, and fair measures of students’ progress and attainment of three-dimensional learning.

• 3-D Investigation Assessments (summative): Embedded in one unit at each grade level, these summative assessments provide students with an open-ended opportunity to show what they’ve learned by planning and conducting their own scientific investigation of a scientific phenomenon. For these three-dimensional performance tasks, we have also provided teachers with assessment guidance and rubrics for scoring student work. These assessments may be found in the following units: Thermal Energy; Ocean, Atmosphere, and Climate; Populations and Resources; and Force and Motion.

The variety of assessments for each unit are designed to work together as a system. While all of them work toward assessment of a coherent set of learning goals, defined by the Progress Build, individual assessment opportunities intentionally span a range of modalities (e.g., multiple choice constructed-response questions, performance tasks, informal observation) and assess content at different grain sizes (e.g., comprehensive of unit content, chapter-level understanding, and individual concepts or elements of practices. For more information on each type of assessment opportunity, see “How assessment opportunities work together.”

• Benchmark assessment (summative): Delivered three times per year in grades 6–8, benchmark assessments report on students’ facility with each of the grade-level appropriate DCIs, SEPs, CCCs, and performance expectations of the NGSS.