Transcript Highlights from the Report

Assessment for Next Generation
Science Standards:
Highlights from the Report
Nancy Butler Songer
Professor of Science Education and Learning Technologies
The University of Michigan
Poll: If you do not gather NGSS-like information for
formative purposes often, why not?
(select all that apply)
A. No time to gather information, let alone apply it
B. I do not have any good examples of NGSS-like
assessment tasks
C. I have some good NGSS-like tasks, but they are
too complicated to analyze and use
D. I do not know if I have some good NGSS-like tasks
or not
E. None of the above
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Committee Members
James W. Pellegrino, University of
Illinois at Chicago (co-chair)
Mark R. Wilson, University of
California, Berkeley (co-chair)
Peter McLaren, Rhode Island
Department of Elementary and
Secondary Education
Knut Neumann, Leibniz Institute for
Science and Mathematics
Education
Kathleen Scalise, University of Oregon
Richard Lehrer, Peabody College of
Vanderbilt University
William Penuel, University of
Colorado at Boulder
Brian Reiser, Northwestern University
Nancy Butler Songer, University of
Michigan
Richard M. Amasino, University of
Wisconsin, Madison (life sciences)
Helen R. Quinn, Stanford University
(physics)
Roberta Tanner, Loveland High
School, CO (engineering)
Edward Haertel, Stanford University
Joan Herman, CRESST, UCLA
Scott F. Marion, National Center for
the Improvement of Education
Assessment
Jerome M. Shaw, University of
California, Santa Cruz
Catherine J. Welch, University of Iowa
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Topics Addressed in the Report
• Challenges of assessing 3-dimensional
learning
• Principles for assessment task development
• Classroom assessment examples
• Issues and options for monitoring purposes
• Creating coherent assessment systems
• Implementation issues
• Summary of main messages
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Some Main Messages
1. New types of assessment are needed, well
designed to address NGSS learning goals
2. State monitoring assessments must move
beyond traditional forms; they will NOT
suffice.
3. NGSS assessment should start with the
needs of classroom teaching and learning
4. States must create coherent systems of
assessment to support both classroom
learning and policy/monitoring functions.
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Some Main Messages (cont.)
5. Implementation should be gradual,
systematic, and carefully prioritized and
must attend to equity
6. Professional development and adequate
support for teachers will be critical.
7. Research is needed
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Assessment Grounded in NGSS Expectations
• Tasks should ask students to apply practices in the
context of disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting
concepts
• Need well-designed, multi-component tasks that use a
variety of response formats:
– Selected-response questions
– short and extended constructed response questions
– performance tasks
– classroom discourse
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Not an Assessment: Systems of Assessment
• No single, on-demand assessment is sufficient
• To support NGSS learning, states need 3 part systems:
 Assessment to support classroom teaching and learning
 Assessment for monitoring student learning
 Indicators of opportunity-to-learn (OTL)
• Monitoring (large-scale) assessments will need both
–
on-demand component
–
classroom embedded component
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Classroom Assessment is Priority:
Challenges of NGSS Assessment in the Classroom
and Tips to Address Them
•
Instruction that is aligned with the Framework and NGSS will
naturally provide many opportunities for teachers to observe
and record evidence of students’ learning.
•
Student activities that reflect such learning include the
practices of:
– developing and refining models;
– generating, discussing, and analyzing data;
– engaging in both spoken and written explanations and
argumentation.
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Characteristics of Classroom-Based
NGSS-Aligned Tasks
• Often include multiple tasks in a set that reflect the connected use
of different scientific practices in the context of disciplinary ideas
and crosscutting concepts;
• Address the progressive nature of learning by providing
information about where students fall on a continuum between
beginning and ending points in a given unit or grade; and
• Include an interpretive system for evaluating a range of student
products that are specific enough to be useful for helping teachers
understand the range of student responses and provide tools for
helping teachers decide on next steps in instruction.
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NGSS Assessment Challenges and Tips to
Address Them
• Challenge: Each performance expectation incorporates all three
dimensions, and the NGSS emphasize the importance of the
presentation as blended science knowledge (performance
expectations).
• Challenge: It will not be feasible to assess all of the performance
expectations for a given grade level during a single assessment
occasion.
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NGSS Assessment Challenges and Tips to
Address Them
• Challenge: Each performance expectation incorporates all three
dimensions, and the NGSS emphasize the importance of the
presentation as blended science knowledge (performance
expectations).
• Challenge: It will not be feasible to assess all of the performance
expectations for a given grade level during a single assessment
occasion.
• Tip #1: Provide students with multiple—and varied—assessment
opportunities to demonstrate their competence on the
performance expectations for a given grade level
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Tip #2: Use a set or cluster of interrelated questions
to generate lots of evidence of NGSS-like knowledge
Specific questions may focus on individual practices, core
ideas, or crosscutting concepts, but together the parts
need to support inferences about students’ threedimensional science learning as described in a given
performance expectation
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Two Examples of NGSS Classroom Assessment
Task Clusters
1. Biodiversity and Three Practices: Fifth grade
2. Climate Change and Two Practices: High school
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Fifth Grade Task Cluster:
Biodiversity in the Schoolyard Zone
• Set of three tasks that ask 5th grade students to determine which
zone of their schoolyard contains the greatest biodiversity
• Tasks require students to demonstrate knowledge of:
– Disciplinary Core Idea -- biodiversity
– Crosscutting Concept -- patterns
– Practices – planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing
and interpreting data, and constructing explanations.
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Example: Task 1
Collect data on the number of animals (abundance) and the number
of different species (richness) in schoolyard zones. The students are
broken into three teams, and each team is assigned a zone in the
schoolyard. The students are instructed to go outside and spend 40
minutes observing and recording all of the animals and signs of
animals seen in their assigned zone. The students record their
information, which is uploaded to a spreadsheet containing all the
students’ combined data.
Purpose: Teachers can look at the data provided by individual
groups or from the whole class to gauge how well students can
perform the scientific practices of planning and carrying out
investigations, and collecting and recording data.
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Task 1: Collect data on biodiversity of schoolyard
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Example (cont.): Task 2
Create bar graphs that illustrate patterns in data on abundance
and richness from each of the schoolyard zones. Students are
instructed to make two bar charts – one illustrating the
abundance of species in the three zones, and another illustrating
the richness of species in the zones – and to label the charts’
axes.
Purpose: This task allows the teacher to gauge students’ ability
to construct and interpret graphs from data -- an important
element of the scientific practice “analyzing and interpreting
data.”
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Task 2: Create graphs of schoolyard biodiversity data
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Example (cont.): Task 3
Construct an explanation to support your answer to the question,
“Which zone of the schoolyard has the greatest biodiversity?”
Previously, students learned that an area is considered
biodiverse if it has both a high animal abundance and high
species richness. In the instruction for this task, each student is
prompted to make a claim, give his or her reasoning, and
identify two pieces of evidence that support the claim.
Purpose: This task allows the teacher to see how well students
understand the core idea of biodiversity and whether they can
recognize data that reflects its hallmarks (high animal abundance
and high species richness). It also reveals how well they can
carry out the scientific practice of constructing explanations. This
task could also be used as part of a “summative” end-of-unit
assessment.
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Task 3: Use their data as evidence for explanations of which
schoolyard area has the greatest biodiversity
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Tip #3 To generate useful information on NGSS blended
knowledge, NGSS assessments might focus on a smaller set
of most important, gatekeeper concepts.
Tip #4 Formative tasks can provide support in the form of
DCI, practice or blended knowledge scaffolds. Classroom
summative tasks often have scaffolds removed.
scaffold
scaffold
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Poll: How Similar Are These Tasks to Activities In
Your Classroom? (select all that apply)
A. Very similar. My kids do these kinds of activities on
a regular basis
B. We do these kinds of activities regularly, but not for
formative assessment purposes
C. Not that similar because these take too much
time/do not follow my curriculum plan
D. Not that similar but I can see the possibility to
shifting to more tasks like this
E. Not that similar and I do not see us moving in this
direction
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Second Set: Two high school tasks to address one
HS performance expectation
HS-ESS3-5: Analyze geoscience data and the results
from global climate models to make an evidence-based
forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate
change and associated future impacts to Earth’s
systems
Tasks require students to demonstrate knowledge of:
Disciplinary Core Idea -- climate change (changes to
global and regional climate)
Crosscutting Concept -- patterns
Practices – analyzing and interpreting data, constructing
explanations.
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Task 1 Activity asks students to analyze estimated temperature
data from ice cores at Vostok Station, Antarctica
Task 1: Extend graph line to make an evidence-based forecast of
average annual temperature from 150 yrs. ago to present
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Task 1 Activity asks students to analyze estimated temperature
data from ice cores at Vostok Station, Antarctica
Task 1: Extend graph line to make an evidence-based forecast of
average annual temperature from 150 yrs. ago to present
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Task 2 Activity asks students to analyze recent, measured air
temperatures at Vostok Station (red data), then construct an
explanation to address a question about natural cycles
Task 2: Construct an explanation to address the question: Do
natural climate cycles (such as Milankovitch Cycles) explain
increases in global temperature in the last 150 years?
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Tip #5: Ideally, all tasks can be coded for evidence of
DCIs, practices and blended knowledge
4 Possible Points : (1) Claim, (1) Reasoning (2) Evidence
• Correct Responses
• Claim: Yes, climate change will affect where the red squirrel can live in the
future.
• Reasoning and Evidence Full credit for three of four:
• R: Species have a preferred temperature range and a change in
temperature in a region will affect the distribution of a species.
• E: The map shows that the present and future distributions do not overlap,
thus climate change will affect the red squirrel.
• E: With increased carbon dioxide emissions in the future, the temperature
will increase and this will affect the red squirrel can live in the future.
• E: The future distribution has moved up north.
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Checklist of Recommendations for NGSS Assessment
1. Do your classroom assessments have multiple and
varied opportunities to demonstrate NGSS-like
blended knowledge?
2. Do your classroom assessments have multiple
component tasks (sets of interrelated questions) for a
given NGSS performance expectation?
3. Do your classroom assessments focus on or highlight
a smaller set of most important gatekeeper concepts?
4. Have you thought about or tried scaffolds or hints in
assessment tasks to help scaffold students’ ability to
generate valuable information about NGSS blended
knowledge?
5. Are you careful to score/provide feedback on DCIs,
practices and blended knowledge products?
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For Further Information
For pre-publication version of NRC Assessment
for Next Generation Science Standards, see:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=184
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Nancy Songer [email protected]