Presenters: Karol Stephens and Marion Reeves

Cost: $30 to include a resource book for use in planning assessment

Description: Good science instruction involves a blended use of assessment strategies.  The GSE for Science call for rethinking how best to use good assessment practices in the classroom.  The focus will be examining our science assessment practices and aligning these to ways that will best support teaching and learning of Science GSE.

The workshop will provide participants with a common language regarding formative and summative assessments.  Teachers will be involved in thinking about how embedded assessments can be instructional strategies and the role that authentic performance plays in true assessment of mastery.  Some of the considerations with the expectations in the new standards lead to several questions

1. How can the sequencing of instruction lead to developing conceptual understanding of the standard? 

2. How can formative assessments be made more active and authentic to incorporate and assess the use of the practices of science in addition to content?

3. How will distributing assessment throughout a unit of instruction help teachers better monitor the student progress toward the larger standard expectation? 

4. And, how can some of this distributed assessment become part of the larger summative assessment of standards mastery?