The examples above involve tasks that cross different domains of science and cover multiple practices. “What Is Going on Inside Me?,” for example, requires students to demonstrate their understanding of how chemical processes support biological processes. It asks students not only to apply the crosscutting concept of energy and matter conservation, but also to support their arguments with explicit evidence about the chemical mechanism involved. In “Measuring Silkworms” and “Biodiversity in the Schoolyard,” students’ responses to the different tasks can provide evidence of their understanding of the crosscutting concept of patterns. It is important to note, however, that “patterns” in each case has a different and particular disciplinary interpretation. In “Measuring Silkworms,” students must recognize pattern in a display of data, in the form of the “shapes” the data can take, and begin to link ideas about growth and variation to these shapes. In con- trast, in “Biodiversity in the Schoolyard,” students need to recognize patterns in the distribution and numbers of organisms in order to use the data in constructing arguments.
Three of the examples—“Measuring Silkworms,” “Biodiversity in the Schoolyard,” and “Climate Change”—provide some classroom-level snapshots of emerging proficiency with aspects of the practices of analyzing and interpreting data and using mathematics and computational thinking. We note, though, that each of these practices has multiple aspects, so multiple tasks would be needed to provide a complete picture of students’ capacity with each of them. Although
assessment tasks can identify particular skills related to specific practices, evalu- ating students’ disposition to engage in these practices without prompting likely requires some form of direct observation or assessment of the products of more open-ended student projects.19
In instruction, students engage in practices in interconnected ways that support their ongoing investigations of phenomena. Thus, students are likely to find that to address their questions, they will need to decide which sorts of data (including observational data) are needed; that is, they will need to design an investigation, collect those data, interpret the results; and construct explanations that relate their evidence to both claims and reasoning. It makes little sense for students to construct data displays in the absence of a question. And it is not pos- sible to assess the adequacy of their displays without knowing what question they are pursuing. In the past, teachers might have tried to isolate the skill of graphing data as something to teach separately from disciplinary content, but the new sci- ence framework and the NGSS call for teachers to structure tasks and interpret evidence in a broad context of learning that integrates or connects multiple con- tent ideas and treats scientific practices as interrelated. Similarly, assessment tasks designed to examine students’ facility with a particular practice may require stu- dents to draw on other practices as they complete the task.
We stress in Chapter 2 that a key principle of the framework is that science education should connect to students’ interests and experiences. Students are likely to bring diverse interests and experiences to the classroom from their families and cultural communities. A potential focus of classroom assessment at the outset of instruction is to elicit students’ interests and experiences that may be relevant to the goals for instruction. However, identifying interests has not often been a focus of classroom assessment research in science, although it has been used to motivate and design assessments in specific curricula.20
One approach that could prove fruitful for classroom assessment is a strat- egy used in an elementary curriculum unit called Micros and Me (Tzou et al., 2007). The unit aims to engage students in the practice of argumentation to learn about key ideas in microbiology. In contrast to many curriculum units, however, this example provides students with the opportunity to pursue investigations related to issues that are relevant to them. The researchers adapted a qualitative
19The phrase “disposition to engage” is used in the context of science education to refer to stu-
dents’ degree of engagement with and motivation to persevere with scientific thinking.
20One example is Issues, Evidence, and You: see Science Education for Public Understanding
methodology from psychology, photo-elicitation, which is used to identify these issues. Research participants take photos that become the basis for interviews that elicit aspects of participants’ everyday lives (Clark-Ibañez, 2004). In Micros
and Me, at the beginning of the unit, students take photos of things or activities
they do to prevent disease and stay healthy. They share these photos in class, as a way to bring personally relevant experiences into the classroom to launch the unit. Their documentation also helps launch a student-led investigation focused on students’ own questions, which are refined as students encounter key ideas in microbiology.
In describing the curriculum, Tzou and Bell (2010) do not call out the prac- tice of self-documentation of students’ personally relevant experiences as a form of assessment. At the same time, they note that a key function of self-documentation is to “elicit and make visible students’ everyday expertise” relevant to the unit content (Tzou and Bell, 2010, p. 1136). Eliciting and making visible prior knowl- edge is an important aspect of assessment that is used to guide instruction. It holds promise as a way to identify diversity in the classroom in science that can be used to help students productively engage in science practices (Clark-Ibañez, 2004; Tzou and Bell, 2010; Tzou et al., 2007).