Three months ago, at the start of CEP813, I posted my initial thoughts about assessment. Those thoughts included three main beliefs:

For the past four years, I have been working on a research project investigating a system of technology-enhanced accessible classroom assessment tasks called ONPAR. ONPAR assessments are designed to provide teachers and students with diagnostic feedback about students' progress towards the learning goals set out in the Next Generation Science...

How do you know if an assessment you intend to use with students is "good"? What criteria should you use to judge its quality? Are there certain "must haves" common to all classroom assessments or does the list depend upon the circumstances, such as content or audience? Once you've identified a potentially problematic item, what resources are...

Last week, I posted a description of an assessment I created for Google Classroom. This was part of an assignment for CEP 813 requiring the exploration of a Content Management System (CMS) we never used before and the creation of a sample assessment that resided completely within that CMS. I chose to explore Google Classroom because, even though...

Does the amount of cheating in online learning warrant the surveillance techniques employed by online exam proctoring services? Providers of services like ProctorU, Examity, HonorLock and Proctorio claim the answer to this question is a resounding yes, and educational institutions seem to agree. An April 2020 EduCause QuickPoll indicated that...

It has been several years since I checked out Google Classroom, and I must admit, I'm impressed! I recently used the Quiz Assignment tool to make an assessment designed to be used formatively with a group of middle school science students studying ecology, and it seems to have most of the features I need to create and administer a good assessment....

Back in mid 1990s, when I was an informal science educator working for a small science museum in Connecticut, our institution became involved in a pilot project to test hands-on "performance assessments" in elementary classrooms in our part of the state. A performance assessment measures how well students apply their knowledge, skills, and...

In this post, I take a look at a mid-unit assessment from the OpenSciEd eighth grade instructional unit on sound waves titled How can a sound make something move?. OpenSciEd is an online source of free, open resource instructional units for middle school science designed to exemplify the vision of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)....

As educators, we are engaged in assessing our students all the time. Some assessments are pre-planned and formal, such as when we give tests and quizzes or assign projects, and others are more informal efforts to collect evidence of what students know and can do. Many of these informal assessments are based on questions students ask, snippets of...

Among the guiding principles described in the Framework for K-12 Science Education (the Framework) (1) which ultimately shaped the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (2) is the idea that connecting to students' interests and experiences is critical to their science learning. This principal translates into recommendations that place questions...

If you're reading this you probably already know something about the challenges of teaching STEM during the pandemic. STEM teachers are experiencing all of the issues other teachers are - from personal technology and connectivity issues (kids and teachers), to poor attendance by some students and low engagement across the board, to figuring out how...

Back in September, Andrew Zucker & Pendred Noyce wrote an opinion piece for Education Week titled How to Make Science Class Relevant During the Pandemic.

Education researchers and policymakers are scrambling to determine the impact of pandemic school shutdowns on student learning outcomes. Projections made in summer and early fall 2020 - which relied on historical trends and prior research due to a lack of recent assessment data - predicted devastating learning losses of as much as a full year by...