What This Means for Instruction

The primary goals of assessment in science education are to advance instruction and provide a means to report progress to students, teachers, parents and communities. Matching assessments to established and accepted standards provides better accountability and a way to promote a scientifically literate population. Assessments that are non-traditional and embedded within instruction give students multiple opportunities to apply and modify newly acquired knowledge and provide teachers valuable information to modify instruction to better meet the needs of students. The authors cited here offer the following suggestions:

• Use non-traditional assessment to comprehensively measure students’ cognitive ability. (Wright)

• Tell students the objectives for assessment. (Wright)

• Provide students with a scoring rubric. (Krueger and Sutton; Tamir, Doran & Chye)

• Tell students how the results of the assessment will be used. (Wright)

• Have students construct concept maps from a list of terms, providing connecting nodes and linking phrases. (Ruiz-Primo and Shavelson; Yin, Vanides, Ruiz-Primo, Ayala & Shavelson)

• Offer formative, non-traditional assessments to give students opportunities to share knowledge and to create an atmosphere of acceptance and encouragement. (Treagust, Jacobowitz, Gallagher & Parker)

• Question students to determine their lines of thinking, to provide feedback and to adjust instruction. (Johnson and Johnson; Krueger and Sutton)

• Use performance-based assessment. (Doran, Lawrenz & Helgeson; Tamir)

• Consider using group tests in addition to individual tests. (Johnson and Johnson)

• Reflect on the results of assessment to modify teaching. (Baron; Krueger and Sutton; Ruiz-Primo, Li & Shavelson; Wright)

• Reflect on the results of assessment to modify the assessment techniques themselves. (Tamir, Doran & Chye)