Assessing the Science and Engineering Practices
I have been thinking a lot about the message that I want to send to students about science and reflecting on my own understanding of what science is. In my short two years as a teacher a lot of kids have come into my room conditioned into memorizing words and concepts until a test. They see science classes as more challenging versions of the memorization-regurgitation cycle and often have insecurities about science. As a student it took me a really long time to realize that science isn’t about memorizing processes or vocabulary but about the feeling I get in my head when I don’t know something yet but know that there is something to be learned. It’s about the confusion that happens when you have data that doesn’t come out you expected it to and you don’t understand why, or the excitement when you can connect two ideas you didn’t realize were related to each other before. I only realized these things when I had mentors in college who asked me questions that I couldn’t answer by regurgitating vocabulary words. They taught me how to learn rather than how to be taught, and I gained so much confidence. No matter how difficult the concept, I had gained some kind of magic comfort in my abilities to work through problems and struggle through sense-making because I had sort of re-focused my education on the act of learning versus the things I learned.
But how do I get 15 year-olds who have been trained from a young age to read their books, do their vocabulary words, and memorize what the teacher tells them to change their ways and actually do this science? How do I give them the the science magic that I found during my college years? Thankfully I am not the only educator who has asked these questions and the creators of NGSS built in science and engineering practices to the standards. I’ve always planned my lessons with the science and engineering practices in mind but I’ve never really told my students what the practices are or how you exactly do those things. So this year I’ve promised myself that I’m going to be more deliberate about this. I made colorful posters with the practices on them and hung them in my room, and have told my students and their parents multiple times that I value the practices. I don’t think that these practices are THE ANSWER to helping students understand real science but I think they are a good place to build from.
I’m going to value these skills in my classroom and I added a grade book category just for them. My goal is to assess my students on one of the practices at least once a week and to be very explicit and clear with them what these skills look like.In an attempt to briefly outline mastery, proficient, and developing skills I put together a rubric that includes all 8 standards. I plan on using the rubric as a general guideline to grade various different projects or tasks, varying from exit slips or bell ringers to longer in-class activities. If I want to assess a certain practice more in-depth I will break it down into its own more detailed rubric, but for now this is what I’ve got. I’ve attached my first and second drafts of these rubrics in attempt to show how my thought process changed. I love google docs and have given all viewers of these documents the ability to add comments…please do so! I am more happy with iteration 2 but am not sure that everything is student friendly or actually what those skills look like. Big thanks to Camden Hanzlick-Burton and Michael Ralph and others on the KABT Facebook page who encouraged and pushed my thinking before I was quite ready to make a blog post.
TLDR: Science is awesome! How do I get students to stop memorizing and do science? I made some rubrics to assess science and engineering skills but think they could use some improvement: HELP!
