Developing Science Assessments for Language Diversity in Early Elementary Classrooms

Sri International, Menlo Park CA

Investigators

Abstract

There is an urgent need for vetted classroom-based, formative assessment tasks for the early grades that align with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS); specifically, ones that consider developing language and literacy differences of young students, while targeting the developmental needs of young science learners in the design. This project will design instructional assessment materials by using an innovative and unique design approach that brings together the coherent and systematic design elements of evidence-centered design. This project will develop a suite of NGSS aligned formative assessment tasks for first-grade science and a set of instructional materials to support teachers as they administer the formative assessments to students with developing language skills and capacities and various linguistic capacities. These resources will be of high utility for classroom teachers in the early elementary grades and offer an important step towards meeting the need for useable NGSS-aligned assessments for the early grades. The design approach will provide assessment developers with a rigorously designed and tested model for developing their own NGSS-aligned assessments which will support the study of science in early elementary classrooms and promote further development of new curriculum materials and support the evaluation of existing curriculum materials. This project will result in a suite of dozens of developmentally appropriate NGSS-aligned formative assessment tasks for first grade. Outcomes include teacher-tested classroom-ready assessment tasks; rubrics that highlight varying degrees of proficiency in all three dimensions of the NGSS (disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices); and support materials to help teachers administer the tasks and interpret and use the results to inform instruction. To build a strong validity argument, the project will gather evidence from multiple sources, including expert reviews, student cognitive interviews, a small-scale classroom pilot, and a larger field study. Using both established psychometric techniques and qualitative methods, the team will examine the structure of assessment scores, assess whether the tasks offer students meaningful and engaging opportunities to demonstrate their science understanding, and determine whether the assessments yield grade-appropriate information that reflects students' language and literacy development for instructional use. In addition, classroom implementation data will be collected to better understand the challenges teachers may face in administering and scoring the tasks, as well as the overall usability and perceived value of the assessments in real-world teaching contexts. This project will contribute to the field of science education by providing teachers with formative assessment tasks, rubrics, and support materials for use in their classrooms and by providing assessment developers with a model for creating NGSS assessments for Grade 1, which include principles and design documents for developing additional tasks. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.