NGSS Assessments and the Sword of Damocles

Inevitably the question of assessments come up when I talk to teachers, parents, and administrators about the NGSS.  We have lived with the education world's variation of the  "Sword of Damocles" hanging over our heads for the last 12 years so it only natural to be concerned about the next iteration.  However, my response to this may seem flip but it is none the less accurate.

For elementary science, the ultimate assessment is called middle school.  

Far more than ever, the standards are developmental.  The physics instruction which starts at Kindergarten, builds through third, middle, high school, and then life.   Without the base knowledge at Kindergarten, it becomes more difficult to catch up with each iteration.   I then step off my soap box and start talking about what I know and what I suspect.

The National Academies Press released a report earlier this year entitled "Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards."  Before this was released, I participated in a webinar where details regarding this report were the focus.  Perhaps the most salient detail was that our "current assessment model was a non-example."   So, what is our current model?  Like everyone else, the ubiquitous #2 pencil plays an essential role.

 

This type of assessment was what it was- a means to an end.  Does it really measure what students "knew and were able to do" or just what they could memorize?

Now, I told you that story to tell you this one.  Once upon a time in Maryland, we had the Maryland State Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP).  According to the state website, the assessment measured three things:

1. How well students solved problems cooperatively and individually.
2. How well students applied what they learned to real world problems.
3. How well students could relate and use knowledge from different subject areas.

At the time, most teachers did not like them because they required a lot of set up and management.  However, with a few exceptions, they would also say that it really did measure what students knew and were able to do.  The downside was individual accountability was difficult.  

Reading between the lines of the NAP report, it feels like an assessment focused on performance will be the focus, but will be done in the digital world.  

Earlier this week, I stumbled across the Technology & Engineering Literacy Assessment (TEL).  Given the proliferation of computers in schools and the gauntlet that PARCC and Smarter Balance have dropped to be fully digital, I would start looking at the TEL as an example of what an NGSS based assessment system will look like. 

Finally, the future of science education comes down to one brutal question.  Will any science assessment count?  No mater how well the assessment is developed, if schools do not see it on an equal level with Common Core assessments, then will it really mater?  Unfortunately, we have moved from an intrinsically motivate institution to one extrinsically motivated.  In the end, do we want the Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads or not. 

A Very Spatial Opportunity

Well, one unit down and eight to go.  The first "official" NGSS unit is loaded into our learning management system.   The unit is based on the kindergarten "Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems" performance expectations.  As you saw from the previous post, students learn about the Baltimore Checkerspot and its dependence on the White Turtlehead.  As part of the performance assessment, students have to locate a place on their schoolyard or community where they could plant the White Turtlhead.  To do this, the teacher gives students a printed copy of map generated by a simple mapping application I created using ArcGIS Online.

Shown below, the teacher can choose to use the aerial view or an abstracted view depending on the level of detail available.  All they need do is slide the bar in the middle back and forth to see what they want.

Link to application

Developing maps and apps like this are available to every school across the U.S. because of the ConnectED initiative launched by the Whitehouse last year.  These are powerful tools.  In years past, these tools were confined to complex desktop applications, but the cloud movement has pushed a lot of their capacity to the online world.  Everyday, new maps and applications are created by users all over the world.  These can be brought into your classroom and used by your students to explore BIG DATA in unimaginable ways.  What is really amazing is that students can be the creators of these maps and applications as well.  

To get started, go to the ConnectED website and sign up for an account.  I would also recommend visiting the Esri EdCommunity page.  You will quickly find out that you are not alone.  If you need help, you should find the closest GeoMentor to you.  These are GIS zealots who love working with GIS and with kids (I have a dot on the map myself).  

Good mapping! 

Coming to a Classroom Near You!

I dropped a surprise on the curriculum teams this summer when I asked them to present an overview of their unit for video.  They turned out so well, that I thought I would share them with you.

Kindergarten Units

First Grade Units

Second Grade Units

A Look Back on Two Weeks of Curriculum Writing

The dust has settled on curriculum writing.  My regiment of writers have started their vacations and I am left with a full Dropbox Don't worry.  I also have everything backed up on at least two flashdrives.  You only make that mistake once.  The files include unit level documents such as the scenario, unit outline, and pre/post assessments.  More importantly, there are a series of files for each lesson.  This includes the teacher lesson plan, student storyboard, interactive notebook pages, and lesson assessment.  The student storyboard is a draft document I will use to create learning objects for our learning management system.

Trying out hands on experiments is one of the perks of curriculum development

The objects will be composed in SoftChalk.   This program allows me to embed a variety of media.  The variety allows for a more personalized learning experience.  This even extends to the text on the page.  When a student clicks on a highlighted word, a definition or image will appear.

As we begin to think about a fully digitized curriculum, one of the big rules we came up with was "Device When Appropriate" or DWA.  I initially found  that my writers felt compelled to develop some digital asset for each lesson.  After talking with them about their lesson, it quickly became apparent that it was really not needed in all lessons.  In a number of lessons, it could also be a huge problem.  Think about a hands-on lesson involving water, soil, or chemicals.  One spill and you lose a computer.  Additionally, I am loathe to replace hand-on experiences with digital ones.  Experiments always work in the digital world.  Kids need to grapple with the gremlins inherit to science and engineering experimentation.

Sometimes a mirror is the best device to use

Many of you are familiar with interactive notebooks and are probably confused by the inclusion of them in my list of developed materials.   I've worked to convert teachers from a worksheet based format to interactive notebooks.  Until I can get everyone acculturated to using notebooks, I wanted to provide some training wheels.  The sample below gives you an idea of what is provided.  These pages are copied and bound in small books for each unit.

Each lesson would use two pages.  It starts on the upper left side with students being asked what they already know about the topic.  The right side constitutes the instructional side of the lesson.  At the end of the lesson, the the student is prompted to show what they now know as a result of the lesson.  The beauty of this format is teachers can see where students started and where they grew by the end of the lesson.

Lastly, perhaps the most important realization I had was the tendency of teachers to write curriculum which directs students to a single answer for a problem.  All the problems we wrote into our units are fairly open-ended in how they can be "solved".  I have attributed this tendency to twelve years of brute-force convergent thinking where all problems were solved with A,B,C,D, or E.  

How far does 2100 minutes go?

Back in April I created an estimate of how long each unit would be.  The ranges on those estimates were wide ranging due to not knowing how much classroom time we would have.  As of now, time for science is set at 30 minutes a day for 70 days in grades K-2.  For grades 3-5, it goes to 60 minutes a day for 70 days. Science alternates its units with Social Studies.  The bottom line for now is that I have 2,100 minutes of curriculum time.

With this in mind, the tables below illustrate the order of the units, a brief statement about the PBA, the current estimate of unit lengths and what I estimated back in April.  Keep in mind that these are still estimates.  Three weeks from now, I will have a better idea.  

A Look Back After Week One of Curriculum Development

First, let me offer my appreciation to the twenty-six members of my NGSS Transition Team that labored through the week to craft storylines, rubrics, unit outlines, and unit assessments.  My strong suggestion to anyone moving to the NGSS is to build a team of classroom teachers.  This group has worked with me since October and twenty of them will continue during curriculum writing starting on July 7.

The NGSS Transition team starts unit planning by thinking about how to reach all students.

In my last post, I discussed the unpacking document.  I can't emphasize enough how important a step this is.  It makes you really consider all three dimensions (DCI, SEP, and CC).  Once the team unpacked the PEs, they began drafting the performance based assessment using the GRASP.  

As the teams worked, I found them going back and forth revising the unpacking document as well as the PBA.   Once that process stabilized, the rubric started to evolve (insert collective groan).  Rubrics are the necessary evil of PBAs.  One tip on rubrics.  Maryland is a PARCC state so we used the four point rubric (0-3) format used throughout those assessments.  

Another tip.  Take advantage of pedagogies, templates, and vocabulary already in use rather than creating unique ones.  For example, the NGSS refers to argument in many of the performance expectations as early as Kindergarten.  The Common Core does not use argument until late elementary.  In the primary grades it is called opinion.  Yes, it is a nuance, but to elementary teachers already under intense change, any use of language they are comfortable with will gain you buy in.  At this point, buy in is really important.   We also realized with primary grades, we needed to really develop two rubrics.  One with teacher language and one with student language.  

The next step was to begin work on the unit outline.  This is where the poetry starts.  From the unpacking document,  all the enduring understandings and driving questions have to be organized to build a coherent storyline that leads to the PBA.  As I illustrated in my earlier post, the unit layout starts with students getting hooked by the scenario.  Right after that, they solve the problem as a form of performance pre-assessemnt.   As the teams worked on this outline a major obstacle had to be addressed.  After the third day of work, I reviewed the preliminary work on the unit outlines to see how they were addressing all three dimensions.  They were doing a great job writing the DCIs but the SEPs were almost absent.  This is the legacy of No Child.  We write to the content and "weave in" the process.  Alternatively, there were units that focused on the "scientific method".  So here is the book I want written:  

Learning to Do:  A Practitioners Guide to Building and Assessing the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices within Context.  

It is a working title.  

It is simply not enough to have students create an investigation, they have to be conscience of the fact that they are learning how to develop an investigation.  This is a real mind shift.  Teachers are becoming used to the hands-on side of science, but now they have to balance that with the "minds-on".  

By Friday afternoon, I had the teams evaluate their unit outlines using the EQuIP Rubric.  The preliminary evaluation shows a pretty good match.  The hard part will be when the lessons are written.  

So, in summary, here are your tips of the day.

1. Get a team.
2. Spend time unpacking the performance expectations.
3. Make sure your curriculum speaks the same language teachers and students are accustomed.  
4. Figure out how to teach the practices and not just the content.  Hands-on.  Minds-on.  

The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with A Lot of Templates- Part 1

Schools are closing which means curriculum development work is spooling up for the summer.  Next week begins the official transition of my curriculum to the NGSS.  I am excited and a little nervous.  I equate it to going on vacation.  You are excited to go, but worry constantly about what you forgot.  Fortunately,  my regiment of curriculum writers has been prepped to be flexible as we go.  I have a plan, but it will undoubtedly need alterations.  With that said, let me reveal my current plan.

As stated in a previous post I introduced you to my cracker jack transition team.  They constitute the vanguard of this development process.  Their mission is to take a topic page full of performance expectations (PE) and mold them into a performance based assessment scenario.  These scenarios must be locally based and culturally relevant.   The odd workflow, shown below, will serve as our plan of attack.

First, my thanks to Peter A'Hearn for his post in California Science.  His notion of storytellers verified the direction I wanted to go and provided the basis for my first template. The NGSS is a very different species of standard.  There is a critical need to really dig deep into the NGSS documents as well as the Framework which caused them.  I evolved Peter's template a little and tried my best to match the colors.

This is a very non-linear process.  The storyline and driving question will actually come last, sort of.  A table like the one shown above has been developed for each performance expectation on a topic page.  I had initially thought we might need to split some of the topic pages into multiple assessments, but the K-2 pages hang well together.   The one exception to this is the grade 1 page on Waves.  I find it difficult to talk about light as waves without bumping into the fact that light also acts like a particle.  I know if I don't do this, I will have one of the local physicists on me.   Don't laugh, I've had a Nobel Prize winner complain about my treatment of gravity at grade 2.     Despite this, we will use them as is.

A couple of things about the document.  First, the PE  is colorized based on the three dimensions.  I liked how the NGSS webpage highlights the PE by its parts and links them to the boxes.  Below this are the prior knowledge (What they should know) and the terminal knowledge (What they learn next). As generalist, I find many elementary classroom teachers do not see the big picture of science and how it develops.  It also emphasizes how the NGSS is developmental. .  Without a firm foundation in science and engineering, students can not catch up (e.g. science has to be taught as a performance based content.  Reading about science is not enough).

The colored table below that simply breaks out each dimension of the PE.  Note the highlighted word in the DCI box.  I am also keeping spatial connections front and center as we develop the curriculum (See the three part series on why spatial thinking is important).  The writer's job is to think divergently.  Come up with as many enduring understandings and driving questions as possible with the goal of pulling all three parts together.  As they do this, I am hoping their minds are whirling on possible ideas for the scenario.  Cue next template.

GRASPS originated from Understanding by Design as a Mad Libs for developing performance based assessments.   Similarly,  the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) has a variant called the Tubric.  Whichever one you use, the premise is to establish the parameters of the performance.

You will note that my workflow is non-linear.  It was not always so.  I initially had a checklist of steps, but each time I read it found myself rearranging steps.  It then dawned on me that my source of consternation came from that fact that these early steps would not be linear.  The premise for the scenario will evolve while the PEs are unpacked.  Likewise the driving questions would need to focus on applying knowledge in order to create a solution to unit the problem.

I will let you know in a week how this step goes, before going to much further down the workflow.