How assessment opportunities work together
The system of assessment for each Amplify Science unit is designed to provide teachers with credible, actionable, and timely diagnostic information about student progress toward the unit’s learning goals and their mastery of the grade-level appropriate disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts. Amplify Science assessments include formal and informal opportunities for students to demonstrate understanding and for teachers to gather information, while allowing teachers the flexibility to decide what to score and what simply to review. The assessment opportunities, listed below, encompass a range of modalities that, as a system, reflect current research on effective assessment strategies.
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.