The inquiryHub research-partnership is a leader in developing assessments of the Next Generation Science Standards. We have worked in collaboration with multiple partners, including educators from Denver Public Schools, the Council of State Science Supervisors, multiple state departments of education, and researchers from the University of Washington and BSCS to develop these assessments.
Many of the tools for assessment design we have developed are available at the STEM Teaching Tools website. The most widely used are ones that support integration of science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts into assessments.
How Embedded Assessments Work in the inquiryHub Biology Curriculum
The inquiryHub Biology curriculum itself has a wide range of assessments embedded within it. These include:
- end-of-unit assessments where students construct explanatory models of the phenomenon they have been studying or develop design proposals for a design challenge they’ve met.
- set of “transfer tasks” in which students apply what they have learned to explore a new phenomena.
- Annotated version of several transfer tasks from the evolution unit have been peer reviewed and are available at Achieve, Inc.’s website.
- These tasks also have validity and reliability information that we have gathered through iterative testing, with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Student Electronic Exit Tickets (SEETs)
A novel approach we have integrated into units are a set of Student Electronic Exit Tickets (or SEETs), which elicit not only students’ understanding of the day’s lesson but also their experience of the classroom. We have developed these to help teachers monitor their students’ feelings of belonging, contribution to knowledge building, and interest in the day’s lesson.
- With funding from the Spencer Foundation, we are developing a platform for visualizing SEET data and helping teachers explore how to make use of the data.
- An example of an annotated SEET is available at Achieve’s Task Annotation Project in Science website.
Educator Professional-Learning Workshops on Designing Assessments
The inquiryHub team offers educator workshops on designing assessments, using a model we are studying as part of a grant from the National Science Foundation. The two-day workshop focuses on integrating the use of science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts into assessments. It also focuses on ways to elicit students’ interests and identities as formative information to help make instruction more meaningful for all students.
For more information on iHub and assessments, please contact inquiryHub@colorado.edu