A Framework for Thinking about and Planning Classroom Assessments in Science

Abstract

Which science domains should be assessed in order to determine what students have learned? What should be assessed within these domains? This chapter will focus on providing answers to these questions. The purpose is not to identify specific indicators or criteria for student performance because these would be specific to each individual assessment task; instead we describe the domains and performance categories that should be considered in developing a school district, school, or classroom-based assessment system. We present these assessment domains and performance categories to stimulate reflection about assessment practice and to provoke thought and dialogue about the development of assessment tasks at the classroom, school, and district level. Our assessment framework looks specifically at science content or discipline-based knowledge, science processes and inquiry skills, reasoning processes, and metarcognitive processes. Although this chapter does not discuss science attitude and social/personal abilities, these too, should be considered in the classroom assessment system. These topics, especially science attitude, are described in other chapters in this book. After presenting our assessment framework, we will depict a professional development scenario that applies our assessment framework.