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Three-Dimensional Nature of the new Washington Comprehensive Assessment of Science (WCAS)

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.

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