Assessment

To better understand integrated STEM education, this work explored scores on the STEM Observation Protocol (STEM-OP), a newly developed observation protocol for use in K-12 science and engineering classrooms. The goals of this work were to better understand how integrated STEM might look throughout an integrated STEM unit and identify limitations of the instrument when examining daily scores and full unit implementation scores. The work takes a mixed methods approach to first examine what scores may be typically seen with daily and unit implementations.

The ASET Toolkit is a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) planning toolkit designed to help science educators plan lessons and units that integrate the 3 dimensions outlined in the Framework (NRC, 2012).

This portal contains classroom-ready assessments for elementary and middle school teachers to use formatively to gain insights into their students’ progress on achieving NGSS performance expectations.

This portal contains classroom-ready assessments for elementary and middle school teachers to use formatively to gain insights into their students’ progress on achieving NGSS performance expectations.

Mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) is a professional knowledge crucial for effective mathematics instruction, encompassing both content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The purpose of this study is to investigate the hierarchical structure of PCK for fractions by seeking further evidence for the PCK-Fractions assessment. The PCK-Fractions measure is designed to examine the effectiveness of teacher education program and field experiences in facilitating preservice teachers’ (PSTs) PCK for children’s fraction reasoning in grades 4–6.

There is widespread agreement about the importance of accounting for the extent to which educational systems advance student learning. Yet, the forms and formats of accountable assessments often ill serve students and teachers; the summative judgements of student performance that are typically employed to indicate proficiencies on benchmarks of student learning commonly fail to capture student performance in ways that are specific and actionable for teachers. Timing is another key barrier to the utility of summative assessment.

Our 5D assessment development process is eight phases, each with a clear goal and tools to support task development. The tools and processes are combined in the 5D Assessment Development Tool for easy access from a single source.

The dimensionality of the epistemic orientation survey (EOS) was examined across four occasions with item factor analysis (IFA). Because of an emphasis on the knowledge generation of epistemic orientation (EO), four factors were selected and built into a short form of EOS (EOS-SF) including knowledge generation, knowledge replication, epistemic nature of knowledge, and student ability. To track the stability of the factor structure for each factor of EOS-SF, longitudinal invariance models were conducted. Partial measurement invariance was obtained for each of the four factors of EOS-SF.

This poster presents findings on middle school students’ understanding of core computer science (CS) concepts, such as variables and control structures, using cognitive think-aloud interviews with eight students. Each student worked on 16-22 formative assessment tasks designed to assess understanding on the ‘Algorithms and Programming’ middle school CS standards. Our study describes students’ interpretations of the CS concepts and discusses potential factors influencing student interpretations. Significance and next steps are described.

‘Algorithms’ is a core CS concept included in the K-12 CS standards, yet student challenges with understanding different aspects of algorithms are still not well documented, especially for younger students. This paper describes an approach to decompose the broad middle-school ‘algorithms’ standard into finer grained learning targets, develop formative assessment tasks aligned with the learning targets, and use the tasks to explore student understanding of, and challenges with, the various aspects of the standard.