The new
science assessment does NOT privilege content above practice or crosscutting
concepts.
We have
heard from two different parts of the region that someone who self-identifies
as an NGSS-assessment-item-writer has returned to their district and
erroneously reported to supervisors and colleagues that the new NGSS-aligned
assessment’s (WCAS) items focus solely on one of the three dimension of NGSS
(namely, the Disciplinary Core Ideas, most closely related to our previous
notions of “content”). This is idea represents a serious misunderstanding that
could derail a district’s transition efforts around NGSS. Not being an
item-writer myself, I reached out to OSPI.
Dawn
Cope of OSPI’s Science Assessment Team responded with wonder that anyone could
come away from item writing with that idea and, explained that all the training
materials and the process used reflect the 3-dimensional nature of the NGSS.
She shared all the training items for me to examine so I could try and see
where the idea came from and I found nothing there that would create such a
misconception. Dawn updated the OSPI Science Assessment website last week and
included information directed at this misconception [LINK].
I also
spoke with Ellen Ebert, our state’s K-12 Director of Science at OSPI. In her
opinion, the idea that these assessment items will be 1-dimensional probably
reflects the thinking of someone quite new to thinking about 3-dimensional
standards; and that it was a mistake to believe that the items will be
1-dimensional. She further explained that a teacher involved in item-writing
may work 3 hours on a single test item for submission. But that same teacher
doesn’t see the next step in the process: Content Review. So while an
individual teacher’s experience may actually have been spent writing
1-dimensional test items, those items would be weeded out through the Content
Review process. Ellen also shared her own experience of writing six test items
and submitting them, then seeing none of them make it out of Content Review.
Here is a graphic that OSPI uses to show the multi-dimensional nature of the new assessment:
This reminds
me of the reality of learning: we know that preconceptions are the lens of
perception bias. Human beings have a powerful ability to experience the world
not as it is, but through the way we expect that it is. But the WCAS assessment
item writing process is engineered to prevent our own confirmation bias from
becoming the reality of NGSS-aligned state-level assessment.