Assessment to Inform Teaching and Learning

OpenSciEd assessments are designed in tandem with the instructional materials so that evidence gathered through assessment is a seamless element of instruction. Well-designed assessment opportunities support evidence gathering for a wide range of purposes, including formative tasks that occur during instruction, embedded tasks with rubrics that support the interpretation and use of student ideas to inform instruction, and summative tasks.

Assessments involve students in analyzing their own and their peers’ ideas and considering how to use those ideas as they move forward in making sense of phenomena.

Assessment opportunities anticipate the wide range of backgrounds and experiences that students bring to the science classroom, and assessment tasks are dexterous enough to capture students’ initial ideas at the start of the unit and how these ideas develop as students integrate information and evidence from unit activities.