Assessment Elements

Formal assessments with any rubrics you have developed or, more simply, what your criteria are for “good work.” Be sure that your assessments reflect student attainment/engagement with your “big ideas.”

Our final and most formal assessment will be a poster presentation at the end of the term in which students will present the results of their data collection and analysis. An additional component of the final assessment will be a written project report (graded based on a rubric used in current Biology classes). Additionally, students will submit their case studies to be used in future classes. Informal assessments or feedback mechanisms, such as “classroom assessment” strategies, e.g. one-minute papers, etc.

Informal assessments in each of the classes will include short papers on sampling techniques, data collection, graphical displays, and descriptive data analysis using small data sets. These components will be graded based on a rubric currently used in science classes. We will also conduct a “post-test” using a 1-minute paper asking the question “What is sustainability” to determine whether there is any change in students’ understanding of the concepts and framework of this issue.

Other non-graded assessments will include discussions of model breakdown, potential errors in data collection, future experimentation, and literature searches.