NEW TOOL: How can assessments be designed to engage students in the range of science and engineering practices?

Posted on March 25, 2016

Students learn science best by engaging in science and engineering practices in sustained investigations as they learn and apply disciplinary and cross-cutting concepts. The practices described in the new vision for K-12 science education outlines the intellectual work students should engage in as they learn science.

To help educators implement the practices, researchers in the Research + Practice Collaboratory have developed a series of “task format” tables, which suggest different possible templates for student activities that integrate real-world science and engineering practices. These were designed to help groups design assessment items—although they can be used to inform curriculum as instruction as well. This new tool describes how to use these task formats to design 3D NGSS assessments.