Assessment in Science High School (9-12)

“Assessment and instruction often become indistinguishable because the assessment activities are an immediate and integral component of instruction.”
– Alaska State Frameworks 1996

This section provides information for teachers about using assessments in a standards-based curriculum. For specific information about Alaska’s Assessment programs (Benchmarks, HSGQE, TerraNova, etc.) go to http://www.eed.state.ak.us/tls/assessment/.

Standards-based assessment program should provide information about the attainment of critical educational goals to a variety of audiences, students, teachers and parents, but also the school, the district, and the state.
No one indicator or type of assessment tool is adequate to meet all of the potential needs for information or to demonstrate the attainment of the Alaska content standards.
High quality, classroom-based assessments provide useful information that can clarify and guide instructional decisions.
Teachers must use multiple measures and diverse avenues of expression to continuously assess the current knowledge of students.
Teachers need to know exactly when a student becomes confused, and they need to be committed to providing alternative experiences to help the student understand.

Science is more than a body of facts. Science is a structured and directed way of asking questions. The process standards are valued by scientists as much as the facts and theories and need to be assessed in a purposeful way.

Observing, communicating, classifying, inferring, predicting, making models and collecting data are all skills to be mastered by high school students at their complexity. Assessment should focus on the progress towards working with variables, controlled experiments and explanations based on evidence and logic rather than on their prior beliefs.
Teachers should ask about the students’ confidence in the accuracy of the data and encourage students to be honest about their findings and hypothesis.
The standards for high school are specific facts and ideas but must be internalized to be remembered and used therefore must be assessed through the scientific inquiry and technology processes.