Analysis of assessments on secondary students' development and interpretation of models

As districts are making the shift to three-dimensional learning the development of a coherent set of high-quality task-based assessments has been a challenge. For this research I collected and analyzed twelve of my district's assessments over the scientific skill of modeling from grades seven through 12. The analysis involved two tools developed by NGSS and Achieve.org to determine the extent to which the assessments ask students to perform tasks that are driven by phenomena and use the three-dimensional in service of sense-making, the Task Screener and the Framework to Evaluate Cognitive Complexity in Science Assessments. The findings support what researchers have said about the shift to three-dimensional task-based assessments: Choosing appropriate engaging phenomena is key to developing high-quality rigorous assessments. While most of my district’s modeling assessments were found to be three-dimensional they are not rigorous because the phenomena guiding the tasks are too general and not puzzling.