Middle School Science

In this Middle School Physical Science performance assessment, students investigate how to prevent or decrease the impact of collisions on people or property, and demonstrate their understanding by applying Newton’s Third Law to engineer, model, and present a practical design solution. 

• Part 1 (~50-60 min, individual or partners) — Students select a personally or locally relevant collision scenario, define its specific criteria and constraints, and brainstorm an engineering solution that prevents the collision or mitigates its impact force.

• Part 2 (~50-60 min, individual or partners) — Students develop a structural poster (digital or physical) featuring free-body diagrams that model the system's forces and apply cause-and-effect reasoning to explain how their design features alter the time, area, or magnitude of the collision forces.

• Part 3 (~50-60 min, whole class) — Students present their finalized problem-and-solution designs to an audience through an interactive format such as a peer gallery walk, lightning talks, or small-group presentations.

NGSS Performance Expectations: MS-PS2-1, MS-ETS1-1 

PADI Principles Emphasized: Student Voice & Agency

In this 8th Grade science performance assessment, students investigate how an ʻukulele produces diverse sounds—and demonstrate their understanding by analyzing graphical wave data, mapping structural vibrations, and creating a particle-level model of mechanical wave transmission through air.

• Part 1 & 2 (~30 min, individual) — Students observe and contrast acoustic changes in volume and pitch from an ʻukulele video, then analyze three distinct distance-time graphs to map wave amplitude and frequency to specific string vibrations.

• Part 3 & 4 (~45 min, individual) — Students construct a zoomed-in, particle-level system model illustrating how vibrating strings transfer energy via localized air particle collisions, then write a cause-and-effect explanation of how plucking force and fret adjustments alter sound properties.

NGSS Performance Expectations: MS-PS4-1, MS-PS4-2 

PADI Principles Emphasized: Identity and Inclusion, Groundedness

In this Middle School science performance assessment, students investigate how changing resource availability impacts populations of organisms — and demonstrate their understanding by analyzing agricultural data and researching ecosystem interactions to communicate the community and cultural impacts of population declines.

• Part 1 (~60 min, whole class/individual) — Students engage with facilitation slides to analyze and interpret temporal data sets tracking monarch butterfly populations, identifying the cause-and-effect relationship between changing farming practices and reduced resource availability.

• Part 2 (~60-120 min, whole class/small groups) — Students participate in a class discussion on personally or culturally significant organisms, watch a contextual video on Indigenous community connections, and collaborate in groups to research, document, and present a story mapping out how ecosystem shifts affect an organism's survival and its related community.

NGSS Performance Expectations: MS-LS2-1 

PADI Principles Emphasized: Identity and Inclusion, Relationships

In this Middle School Life Science performance assessment, students investigate how genetic diversity affects a population's vulnerability to disease — and demonstrate their understanding by modeling how sexual reproduction generates phenotypic variation and constructing an argument on whether native 'Ōhi'a trees possess natural resistance traits against a deadly fungal pathogen.

Parts: 

• Part 1 (~45 min, individual/whole class) — Students watch a contextual documentary, annotate a distribution curve model mapping how complex genetic configurations and diverse environmental factors concurrently dictate 'Ōhi'a tree heights, and use Punnett squares to illustrate how sexual reproduction recombines alleles across thousands of genes.

• Part 2 (~45-90 min, partner/individual) — Students review field maps and multi-line laboratory survival graphs to record visual data patterns, using this evidence to draft a scientific argument on whether Rapid 'Ōhi'a Death (ROD) resistance traits naturally exist within the wild population.

NGSS Performance Expectations: MS-LS1-5, MS-LS3-2 

PADI Principles Emphasized: Groundedness, Relationships

In this Middle School science performance assessment, students explore the growing issue of orbital pollution — and demonstrate their understanding by investigating how high-velocity debris impacts orbital infrastructure, applying Newton’s Third Law to explain equal and opposite reaction forces, and engineering a creative mechanical system to clean up the near-Earth environment.

Parts: 

• Part 1 (~15 min, partner/whole class) — Students watch a documentary featuring astrodynamicist Moriba Jah, analyze real-time orbital data using the online Wayfinder tool, and reflect on the cultural concept of Āina to propose stewardship actions for balancing the space ecosystem.

• Part 2 (~15 min, individual) — Students analyze data comparing terrestrial and orbital speeds to draw before-and-after collision diagrams, evaluating how the massive kinetic energy of a tiny piece of space debris transfers into heat, deformation, and structural damage upon striking a satellite.

• Part 3 (~15 min, individual or small groups) — Students invent, model, and label a creative debris-removal system (such as a magnetic tug, tether, or net), using vector arrows to illustrate how their design safely manages reciprocal action-reaction forces while identifying engineering constraints like cost, mass, or fuel.

NGSS Performance Expectations: MS-PS2-1 

PADI Principles Emphasized: Identity and Inclusion, Student Voice & Agency

In this Middle School Life Science performance assessment, students evaluate the complex ecological networks within native Hawaiian forests — and demonstrate their understanding by using a dual-relationship ecosystem model to trace how invasive species disruptions propagate across populations and by evaluating competing forestry management solutions.

Parts: 

• Part 1 (~30 min, individual) — Students analyze an interactive ecosystem model featuring color-coded arrows to construct an empirical argument on how native 'Ōhi'a trees sustain local biodiversity, subsequently tracking how non-native feral pigs indirectly degrade regional fresh water and flora populations.

• Part 2 (~30 min, individual) — Students integrate documentary evidence with a multi-trophic network model to explain how pre-existing physical bark damage from hooved animals accelerated the lethal spread of the Rapid 'Ōhi'a Death (ROD) fungal pathogen across the islands.

• Part 3 (~30 min, individual/whole class) — Students annotate their ecosystem models to illustrate the systemic stabilization achieved by constructing forest fencing, explicitly evaluating how keeping out feral pigs reduces fungal entry vectors, before participating in a reflective class-wide feedback session.

NGSS Performance Expectations: MS-LS2-4, MS-LS2-5 

PADI Principles Emphasized: Groundedness, Relationships