EarthComm Assessment Opportunities

1. Integrative Thinking
The National Science Education Standards (NSES) state: “Assessments must be consistent with the decisions they are designed to inform.” This means that as a prerequisite to establishing expectations, teachers should consider the use of assessment information. In EarthComm, students must be able to articulate the connection between Earth Science concepts and their own community. This means that they have to integrate traditional Earth Science content with knowledge of their surroundings. It is likely that this kind of integration will be new to students, and that they will require some practice at accomplishing it. Assessment in one chapter can inform how the next chapter is approached so that the ability to apply Earth Science concepts to local situations is enhanced on an ongoing basis.

2. Importance
An explicit focus of NSES is to promote a shift to deeper instruction on a smaller set of core science concepts and principles. Assessment can support or undermine that intent. It can support it by raising the priority of in-depth treatment of concepts, such as students evaluating the relevance of core concepts to their communities. Assessment can undermine a deep treatment of concepts by encouraging students to parrot back large bodies of knowledge-level facts that are not related to any specific context in particular. In short, by focusing on a few concepts and principles, deemed to be of particularly fundamental importance, assessment can help to overcome a bias toward superficial learning. For example, assessment of terminology that emphasizes deeper understanding of science is that which focuses on the use of terminology as a tool for communicating important ideas. Knowledge of terminology is not an end in itself. Teachers must be watchful that the focus remains on terminology in use, rather than on rote recall of definitions. This is an area that some students will find unusual if their prior science instruction has led them to rely largely on memorization skills
for success.

3. Flexibility
Students differ in many ways. Assessment that calls on students to give thoughtful responses must allow for those differences. Some students will find the open-ended character of the EarthComm chapter reports disquieting. They may ask many questions to try to find out exactly what the finished product should look like. Teachers will have to give a consistent and repeated message to those students, expressed in many different ways, that the ambiguity inherent in the open-ended character of the assessments is an opportunity for students to show what they know in a way that makes sense to them. This also allows for the assessments to be adapted to students with differing abilities and proficiencies.
4. Consistency
While the chapter reports are intended to be flexible, they are also intended to be consistent with the manner in which instruction takes place, and the kinds of inferences that are going to be made about students’ learning on the basis of them. The EarthComm design is such that students have the opportunity to learn new material in a way that places it in context. Consistent with that, the chapter reports also call for the new material to be expressed in context. Traditional tests are less likely to allow this kind of expression, and are more likely to be inconsistent with the manner of teaching that EarthComm is designed to promote. Likewise, in that EarthComm is meant to help students relate Earth Science to their community, teachers will be using the chapter reports as the basis for inferences regarding the students’ abilities to do that. The design of the chapter reports is intended to facilitate such inferences.

EarthComm Assessment Tools
The series of evaluation sheets and scoring rubrics provided in the back of this Teacher’s Edition should be available to students before they begin their first investigation. Consider photocopying a set of the sheets for each student to include in his or her EarthComm notebook. The purpose of distributing the evaluation sheets is to help students become familiar with the criteria and expectations for their work.
If students have a complete set of the evaluation sheets, you can refer to the relevant evaluation sheet at the appropriate point within an EarthComm lesson.

Think about It Evaluation Sheet
This sheet will help students to learn the basic expectations for the warm-up activity. Think about It is intended to reveal student conceptions about the phenomena or processes explored in the activity. It is not intended to produce closure and so your assessment of student responses should not be driven by a concern for correctness. Instead, the evaluation sheet emphasizes that you want to see evidence of prior knowledge and that students should communicate their thinking clearly. It is unlikely that you will be able to apply this assessment every time students complete a warm-up activity (there are only so many hours in a teacher’s day), yet in order to ensure that students value the importance of committing their initial conceptions to paper and taking the warm-up seriously, you can use this evaluation sheet as a spot check on the quality of their work.

Investigate Notebook Entry–Evaluation Sheet
This evaluation sheet is designed to allow the students to get a sense of the expectations for EarthComm notebook entries. When assessing student investigations, keep in mind that the Investigate section of an EarthComm activity equates to the exploration phase of the 5E learning-cycle model where students explore their conceptions of phenomena through hands-on activity. This evaluation sheet provides a variety of criteria for you to select from when students will be in a better position to ensure that the quality of their work meets the highest possible standards and expectations. Encourage students to internalize the criteria by making the criteria part of your “assessment conversations” with them as you circulate around the classroom. For example, while students are working, you can ask them criteria-driven questions such as: “Is your work thorough and complete? Are all of you participating in the activity? Do you each have a role to play in solving this problem?” and so on.

EarthComm Notebook Entry–Checklist
The EarthComm Notebook Entry–Checklist provides a quick summary of important processes, concepts, and skills that you might wish to assess during and after an investigation. You can add further criteria specific to your classroom needs or a particular investigation. The checklist provides a quick guide for student self-assessment and also provides you with an opportunity to quickly score student work.

Check Your Understanding Notebook Entry–Evaluation Sheet
This evaluation sheet is used to help you evaluate the extent to which students understand the key concepts explored in the activity and explained in the Digging Deeper reading section. The two criteria used in the sheet include “Reflects an Understanding of Key Concepts” and “Clarity of Expression.”

Student Presentation Evaluation Form
This evaluation form provides three simple yet powerful criteria to help your students prepare their presentations. In order to prepare properly, students must know that you have expectations for the quality of the ideas they present, their ability to answer questions during the presentation, and their overall comprehension of the material. When students work in groups and present the results of their inquiry, they often divide up the work, with some members preparing the presentation and others delivering the presentation. Students need to know that any member of the group can be called upon to demonstrate their understanding of the material during a presentation. This evaluation form will help you to make this clear to students.

Student Evaluation of Group Participation
One of the challenges to assessing students who work in collaborative teams is assessing group participation. Students need to know that each group member must pull his or her weight. As a component of a complete assessment system, especially in a collaborative learning environment, it is often helpful to engage students in conducting a self-assessment of their participation in a group. Knowing that their contributions to the group will be evaluated provides an additional motivational tool to keep students constructively engaged. This evaluation form provides students with an opportunity to assess group participation. In no case should the results of this evaluation be used as the sole source of assessment data. Rather, it is better to assign a weight to the results of this evaluation and factor it in with other sources of assessment data.

Student Ratings and Self Evaluation
This form provides an alternative to the student evaluations of group participation. You might alternate the use of these forms between chapters. The two-page form is flexible in that you can assign values as you see fit for your classroom and it allows students to provide extra comments to explain the ratings.
Reviewing and Reflecting upon Your Teaching
Reviewing and Reflecting upon Your Teaching provides an important opportunity for professional growth. A master copy of a two-page Teacher Review form is included at the back of each chapter. At the back of this Teacher’s Edition are various Evaluation sheets for both students and teachers. They will help you to reflect upon your teaching for each investigation. We suggest that you try to answer each question at the completion of each investigation, then go back to the relevant section of this Teacher’s Edition and write specific comments in the margins that will help you the next time you teach the investigation. For example, if you found that you were able to make substitutions to the list of materials needed, write a note about those changes in the margin of that page of this guide.