Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards (2014) / Chapter Skim
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2 Assessments to Meet the Goals of the Framework
2 Assessments to Meet the Goals of the Framework
Pages 25-46
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a focus on developing students' understanding of a limited set of core ideas in the disciplines and a set of crosscutting concepts that connect them; 2. an emphasis on how these core ideas develop over time as students' progress through the K-12 system and how students make connections among ideas from different disciplines; 1We refer readers to the framework and the Next Generation Science Standards for a complete picture of what they propose for science education.
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. Rather, the goal is to strengthen science education by helping students understand the similarities and differences between science and engineering by making the connec 26 Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards
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The framework's goals are explicitly intended for all students, and it emphasizes that learners from diverse backgrounds can indeed engage in and learn complex subject matter. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
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crosscutting concepts, and (3) disciplinary core ideas: see Box 2-1.
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For natural and built systems alike, conditions of stability and determinants of rates of change or evolution of a system are critical elements of study. 3 Disciplinary Core Ideas Physical Sciences PS1: Matter and its interactions PS2: Motion and stability: Forces and interactions PS3: Energy PS4: Waves and their applications in technologies for information transfer Life Sciences LS1: From molecules to organisms: Structures and processes LS2: Ecosystems: Interactions, energy, and dynamics LS3: Heredity: Inheritance and variation of traits LS4: Biological evolution: Unity and diversity Earth and Space Sciences ESS1: Earth's place in the universe ESS2: Earth's systems ESS3: Earth and human activity Engineering, Technology, and Applications of Science ETS1: Engineering design ETS2: Links among engineering, technology, science, and society SOURCE: National Research Council (2012a, pp.
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Explicit attention to these concepts can help students develop an organizational framework for connecting knowledge across disciplines and developing integrated understanding of what they learn in different settings. The crosscutting concepts will be reinforced when they are addressed in the context of many different disciplinary core ideas.
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. INTEGRATION: THREE-DIMENSIONAL SCIENCE LEARNING The framework emphasizes that science and engineering education should support the integration of disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts with the prac tices needed to engage in scientific inquiry and engineering design.3 In this report, we refer to this integration of content knowledge, crosscutting concepts, and prac tices as "three-dimensional science learning," or more simply "three-dimensional learning." That is, during instruction, students' engagement in the practices should always occur in the context of a core idea and, when possible, should also connect to crosscutting concepts.
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provide the connections to the three dimensions, listing the specific practices students would use and the relevant specific core ideas and crosscutting concepts for this grade level. The text in these boxes expands and explains the performance expectations in terms of each of the three framework dimensions.5 The framework argues that disciplinary core ideas should be systemati cally revisited in new contexts across time to allow students to apply, extend, and develop more sophisticated understanding of them.
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This approach calls for standards, curriculum materials, and assessments that are coherent across time so that they can both help students build increasingly sophisticated understandings of the core ideas across multiple grades and support students in making connections among core ideas in different disciplines. Learning Progressions: Developing Proficiency Over Time Research on learning shows that to develop a coherent understanding of scien tific explanations of the world, students need sustained opportunities to engage in the practices, work with the underlying ideas, and appreciate the interconnec tions among these practices and ideas over a period of years, not weeks or months (National Research Council, 2007)
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The section titled "Disciplinary Core Ideas" is reproduced verbatim from A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Integrated and reprinted with permission from the National Academy of Sciences.
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(2-PS1-2) Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions Constructing explanations and designing solutions in K-2 builds on prior experiences and progresses to the use of evidence and ideas in constructing evidence-based accounts of natural phenomena and designing solutions.
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For the practices and crosscutting concepts, the framework provides sketches of possible progressions for learning each practice or concept, but it does not indicate the expectations at any particular grade level. The NGSS built on those sketches and provide a matrix that defines what each practice might encom pass at each grade level, as well as a matrix that defines the expected uses of each 6The American Association for the Advancement of Science (2001, 2007)
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(They also do not identify spe cific assessment targets, as assessment-linked learning progressions do.) However, they are based on the perspective that instruction and assessments must be designed to support and monitor students as they develop increasing sophistica tion in their ability to use practices, apply crosscutting concepts, and understand core ideas as they progress across the grade levels.
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When students in the middle grades study how food is used, they have to draw on ideas from physical science, such as conservation of matter, transforma tion of energy, and chemical reactions, if they are to develop the explanatory core idea in the framework. Understanding how energy and matter cycle and flow is a tool for understanding the functioning of any system -- so these are crosscutting concepts as well.
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Assessment The assessment portion of the example focuses not only on the important claims students have identified (e.g., that oxygen is used by cells) but also on students' proficiency with providing an argument for an explanatory mechanism that con nects relevant scientific ideas from different disciplines (e.g., a chemical reaction is needed to release stored energy from food, and oxygen is a component of that Assessments to Meet the Goals of the Framework 39
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NOTE: LS = life sciences, NGSS DCI = Next Generation Science Standards, Disciplinary Core Ideas, and PS = physical sciences. SOURCE: Adapted from Krajcik et al.
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Disciplinary Core Ideas: LS1.C: Organization for Matter and Energy Flow in Organisms • ithin individual organisms, food moves through a series of chemical reactions in which it is broken down W and rearranged to form new molecules, to support growth or to release energy. • n most animals and plants, oxygen reacts with carbon-containing molecules (sugars)
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This example shows that, with appropriate prior instruction, students can tackle tasks that assess three-dimensional science learning, that is, tasks that ask them to use science practices in the context of crosscutting concepts and disci plinary core ideas. Furthermore, it shows that classroom engagement in practices (in this case, supporting an explanation with argument from evidence)
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Level 3: Full account, using physical science ideas including both the matter and energy accounts -- oxygen is combined in a chemical reaction with food or glucose that includes a conversion of the stored energy in food to forms usable by the cells SOURCE: Adapted from Krajcik et al.
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Assessing Three-Dimensional Learning Assessing three-dimensional learning is perhaps the most significant challenge because it calls for assessment tasks that examine students' performance of a practice at the same time that they are working with disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting con cepts. Meeting this challenge can best be accomplished through the use of assessment tasks that comprise multiple related questions, which we refer to as "multicomponent tasks." CONCLUSION 2-1 Measuring the three-dimensional science learning called for in the framework and the Next Generation Science Standards requires assessment tasks that examine students' performance of scientific and engineering practices in the context of crosscutting concepts and disciplinary core ideas.
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. CONCLUSION 2-2 The Next Generation Science Standards require that assessment tasks be designed so that they can accurately locate students along a sequence of progressively more complex understandings of a core idea and successively more sophisticated applications of practices and crosscutting concepts.
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Assessment tasks that attempt to test practices in strict isolation from one another may not be meaningful as assess ments of the three-dimensional science learning called for by the NGSS. CONCLUSION 2-4 Effective evaluation of three-dimensional science learning requires more than a one-to-one mapping between the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
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