The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) hold promise for revolutionizing science teaching and learning in the United States; however, to enact the vision of the standards, science instruction will need to change significantly. While typical science instruction has focused on content acquisition and relied on teacher-dominated discourse, the NGSS cover fewer topics in more depth and articulate a vision of classrooms in which students are thinking and talking like scientists. We will present findings from a four-year project funded by the National Science Foundation to design, field-test, revise, and study a 9-week middle school unit called Disruptions in Ecosystems. In the presentation, we will focus on the features of the curriculum, with special focus on the assessments, and answer the question, “How can we develop high quality assessments of middle school students’ learning during an NGSS-designed curriculum about ecosystems?” We will share data from two years of field-testing with 50 teachers and more than 1600 students in a large, urban school district. The Disruptions in Ecosystems unit addresses NGSS core ideas about ecosystems and supports the content through three of the NGSS science practices: (1) developing and using models, (2) constructing explanations, and (3) engaging in argument from evidence.
Results/Conclusions
To measure student learning throughout the unit, we developed a set of items situated in authentic ecological scenarios designed to measure students’ knowledge of science content and practices. We conducted think aloud interviews with a sample of students (n=15) to gather initial validity evidence and then administered the assessments to the full sample (n=1622) and analyzed the responses from a subset (n=200). Initial analysis has focused on students’ ability to construct explanations and argue from evidence about ecosystems. Results show that students’ performance improved slightly on explanation and argument items over the course of the 9-week unit. Mean score improved from 6.58 (SD=2.00) to 7.74 (SD=2.55) out of 15 on explanation items and from 8.35 (SD=2.94) to 11.39 (SD=2.02) out of 15 on argumentation items. Two raters scored each of the open-ended responses and though there was strong inter-rater agreement for the ecosystems content items (ranging from 78% to 96% agreement), raters had low agreement on items that included scientific reasoning and critique (ranging from 40% to 66% agreement). We conclude that the items show promise, but will discuss planned revisions and implications for the design of assessments of ecology knowledge and practices that are aligned with the NGSS.