Assessment

All science units have multiple assessment types, such as kinesthetic, rubric-based, open-ended, and multiple choice assessments, to help teachers get a complete picture of what students need. Common assessments are designed to provide detailed and concrete information on what students know and do not know with respect to specific learning targets.

TCTs are a vital component for a fully functioning and comprehensive science assessment system. To continue to improve high-quality teaching and learning in science, time should be dedicated to not only refining and reflecting on the past use of TCTs, but also to continuing to prepare students for the demands of 3-dimensional science assessments.

The purpose of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Task Screener is 1) to determine whether classroom assessment tasks are high quality, designed to elicit evidence of three-dimensional performances, and designed to support the purpose for which they will be used, and 2) to provide a group of reviewers with a common set of features to ground conversations about what it “looks like” for students to demonstrate the kinds of performances expected by three-dimensional standards.