Essentials of Science Classroom Assessment

Xiufeng Liu

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781412961011
• eBook ISBN:
  9781483374604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

A concise science assessment text that helps K–12 teachers master the effective science assessment methods that lead to improved student learning


Presenting both traditional and innovative assessment methods integral to science teaching and learning, Essentials of Science Classroom Assessment shows teachers the connection between effective science assessment and improved student learning. The text uses a competence-based approach consistent with the National Science Education Standards to help teachers master assessment skills, apply them to science classroom instruction, and evaluate their impact on student learning.

Key Features and Benefits

• Provides practical examples from both elementary and secondary science classrooms to demonstrate how to design a wide variety of traditional and innovative assessment methods
• Presents case scenarios in each chapter that help teachers reflect on the assessment issues they will encounter in their own classrooms
• Includes end-of-chapter checklists and practice questions that allow readers to check their mastery of assessment skills before moving on, as well as annotated bibliographies that direct them to additional readings on topics of interest

The Web-based Student study site provides electronic flashcards, practice quizzes, alternative assessment tasks, additional Web resources, and abstracts identifying more than forty common K–12 student preconceptions of science topics.

CHAPTER 1

Assessment for Learning and Teaching

Deciding to become a teacher is a major career decision. With much excitement and anticipation after your acceptance into a teacher education program, your journey toward becoming a science teacher starts in university classrooms. You are taking various courses, including science teaching methods courses. You may not give much attention to science assessment because your teacher education program may not offer a stand-alone science assessment course. From your grade school to university, you have seen your teachers conducting all kinds of assessment: quizzes, exams, standardized tests, and projects, to name just a few. Assessment is a routine task for all teachers; you may think that conducting science assessment requires no more than a commonsense approach, as Elisia and Eric, two preservice teachers think:

ERIC, ELEMENTARY PRESERVICE TEACHER

Eric enters the elementary teacher certification program with a psychology major. Among others, he is taking an elementary science methods course to learn how to teach science. The textbook for the course is a popular one commonly used by many universities and contains a chapter on science assessment. According to the course syllabus, he will have 2 weeks discussing various assessment methods. He knows assessment is an essential part of elementary science teaching because he remembers his experiences as an elementary school student in taking end-of-unit tests and state science exams and, of course, receiving a grade for science on the report card. He basically thinks assessment is a way to assess students and to give students a grade. Beyond grading students, he does not know other roles assessment may play in science teaching and leaning. As far as assessment techniques go, he feels that he has no difficulty in developing a test using multiple-choice questions, short-answer questions, and even a project. Overall, he does not think assessment should play a big role in his teaching of elementary grades, given his belief that students of such young ages need well-rounded education and development, instead of just being good at test taking. At least, he anticipates students will have diverse abilities and backgrounds, and thus no single assessment will fit them all. Elisia enters the secondary science—more specifically, chemistry—certification program with a major in chemistry. She is taking a secondary science methods course in addition to a number of other courses. Her science methods course also adopts a popular secondary science methods text in which assessment is one of its many chapters. The course syllabus shows that there will be 2 weeks of class time devoted to science assessment. Elisia thinks assessment is an essential component of her responsibility as a secondary science teacher because grades have to be given to students, and their transcripts will be used for many purposes, including applying for university admissions and scholarships. Elisia does not think conducting science assessment is a challenging task because she knows what multiple-choice, essay, project, and even standardized tests are. She is particularly familiar with multiple-choice questions because they are the dominant question type used in her high school and university science classes. Unlike Eric, Elisia believes that assessment should play a very important part of her teaching because high schools should prepare students for life, in which passing tests for various opportunities is a necessity. Thus, it is her responsibility to prepare students for various external tests.

Do Eric and Elisia’s cases sound familiar to you? For them, assessment is what a teacher does to students. This seems to be the common conception among most preservice teachers and what they have seen routinely in science classrooms from elementary school to university. Can and should science assessment be more than grading students? Should and can science assessment be different in elementary and secondary science classrooms?

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ASSESSMENT AND INSTRUCTION

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In thinking about how assessment should be conducted in elementary and secondary science classrooms, you first need to consider the relationship between assessment and instruction. The National Science Education Standards (NSES) Teaching Standard C states the following:

Teachers of science engage in ongoing assessment of their teaching and student learning. In doing this, teachers

a. Use multiple methods and systematically gather data about student understanding and ability.

b. Analyze assessment data to guide teaching.

c. Guide students in self-assessment.

d. Use student data, observations of teaching, and interactions with colleagues to reflect on and improve teaching practice. (National Research Council [NRC], 1996, pp. 37–38)

How does the Teaching Standard C sound to you? Besides assessment of students, Teaching Standard C also suggests assessment to be used to guide and improve teaching. For many beginning science teachers, the role of science assessment in guiding and improving teaching may be unfamiliar. One key characteristic of science assessment implied in the above teaching standard is that science assessment is an integral component of science teaching and learning. Science assessment is not just one activity, such as an end-of-unit test or state exam, but also an ongoing process happening simultaneously with science teaching and learning activities. Science assessment is not only what you do to students but also what you do to inform teaching. A National Research Council committee has called for the design of a science learning environment to be assessment centered (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000), which best demonstrates the prominent role of assessment in the teaching and learning processes. Science teaching and learning in an assessment-centered learning environment are guided by assessment and, in turn, inform assessment.

Assessment is a systematic, multistep, and multifaceted process involving the collection and interpretation of data (NRC, 1996). There are four components in assessment. The data use component refers to the intended use of assessment results such as grading students, planning instruction, improving curricula, and comparing students. The data collection component refers to the target on which assessment data will be collected, such as student achievement, science inquiry ability, and attitude toward science. The methods to collect data refers to the specific ways to collect data, such as paper-and-pencil tests, interviews, and performance tasks. And the last component, users of data, refers to people or organizations that will have an interest in or make use of the data, such as students, teachers, and universities. The combination of the above four components forms assessment. Thus, assessment is a complex process; it entails systematic planning, implementation, analysis, and interpretation. The core of assessment is data, which make assessment empirical or, in other words, a scientific inquiry enterprise.

Assessment includes two processes: measurement and evaluation. Measurement is a process of quantifying the degree to which a student possesses a given characteristic, quality, or feature, while evaluation is the process of interpreting measurement data based on a set of criteria in order to make certain judgments. A key tool of measurement is a test. A test is a set of questions or tasks that elicit student responses plus a set of scoring keys or schemes to score them. A test can include a variety of question formats, such as multiple-choice questions, a concept mapping task, and a performance task.

Although science assessment is integral to science teaching and learning, it is also distinct from science teaching and learning. Guided by the overall purpose for supporting and improving science teaching and learning, science assessment purposefully collects relevant data, as well as analyzes and interprets them to answer specific questions about science teaching and learning. The centrality of data in science assessment requires that data to be collected are of high technical quality (i.e., meeting technical standards). Only when we are sure that assessment data are of high technical quality can we use assessment data to answer important questions about science teaching and learning. Sample questions that may be answered by science assessment are the following: What preconceptions do students bring to the science classroom? How do students’ conceptions change during science teaching and learning? And have students mastered the expected learning standards?

Because science assessment and science teaching and learning are both distinct and closely related, we may consider science assessment and science teaching and learning as two sides of the same coin. Without teaching and learning, science assessment is meaningless; without assessment, science teaching and learning is mindless. Therefore, you must consider science assessment and teaching and learning at the same time when planning for effective science instruction.

APPLICATION AND SELF - REFLECTION 1.1

Give two assessment examples you experienced when you were a student, one in elementary school and another in high school, to answer the following questions:

What was the intended use of the assessment?

What was the target of the assessment and how was it measured?

How was the assessment result used?

Are there matters of concern to you from your current perspective as a preservice teacher?

How should the assessment be enhanced?

FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE ASSESSMENT

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What are fundamental considerations of science assessment? A National Research Council committee on assessment conceptualizes assessment to include three foundations:

FIGURE 1.1 The Assessment Triangle

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Source: Adapted from the NRC (2001).

In Figure 1.1, observation refers to assessment tasks through which students’ attainment of learning outcomes is elicited, interpretation refers to measurement models through which the assessment data are interpreted, and cognition refers to theories on how students learn. Observation and interpretation are related to data collection, analysis, and validation, and cognition is related to science teaching and learning. Observation and interpretation and science teaching and learning must agree with each other.

Assessment Foundation 1: Cognition

Research has suggested that the social-cultural constructivist approach to science teaching is most promising (Tobin, Tippins, & Gallard, 1994). Effective teaching follows the following principles:

• Teachers must draw out and work with the preexisting understandings that their students bring with them.
• Teachers must teach some subject matter in depth, providing many examples in which the same concept is at work and providing a firm foundation of factual knowledge.
• The teaching of metacognitive skills should be intergraded into the curriculum in a variety of subject areas. (Bransford et al., 2000)

In addition, effective teaching takes place in the following learning environments:

• Student centered: Schools and classrooms are organized around students.
• Knowledge centered: Attention is given to what is taught, why it is taught, and what competence or mastery looks like.
• Assessment centered: this consists of formative assessment—ongoing assessments designed to make students’ thinking visible to both teachers and students—and summative assessment—assessments at the end of a learning unit to find out how well students have achieved the standards.
• Community centered: Develop norms for the classroom and school as well as connections to the outside world that support core learning values. (Bransford et al., 2000)

Implications of the above principles for science assessment are presented in Table 1.1.

Assessment Foundation 2: Observation

How can we collect data to fulfill the above assessment demands? Different assessment demands require different types of data to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Assessment for Learning and Teaching
• 2 Assessment of Preconceptions
• 3 Summative Assessment
• 4 Assessment of Science Inquiry
• 5 Standardized Tests
• 6 Assessment of Ongoing Learning
• 7 Grading Science Achievement
• 8 Using Data to Improve Assessment and Instruction
• Glossary
• Index
• About the Author