What You Will Learn
You will:
- Acquire evidence of how well your K-12 students are achieving science literacy as defined by local and national state standards
- Receive valid and reliable evidence to inform and adapt science instruction, and to help guide professional development
- Acquire evidence of achievement and program effectiveness for different groups of students
- Understand your students’ achievement in science against local and national standards to provide baseline and comparison data around different instructional interventions
Who Will Benefit
- Science Teachers, K-12
- Educators
- District and School Administrators
- State Departments of Education
- Federally funded Science Reform and Research Projects
Service Details
Following are the types of development and technical assistance that WestEd can customize, per client needs:
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- Provide all testing materials, conduct school enrollments, and provide hand-scoring, data analysis, and reporting
- Offer training in test set-up, administration, and scoring
- Provide customized professional development in the interpretation and use of data to develop classroom interventions to help improve instruction
- Design, develop, and validate custom student science assessments, and teacher science assessments
- Develop summative state-level science assessments for both regular science education and alternate science education aligned to Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
- Work with science teachers and district personnel in the development of formative assessments, and in helping teachers with the formative assessment process
The PASS assessments can be administered to elementary, middle, and high school students to build on research on the properties of science assessment and current approaches for assessment development and scoring. Integrated teams of grade-level teachers, scientists, science educators, and measurement specialists developed the PASS assessments.
PASS uses multiple measures to obtain the most informative and useful assessment results. PASS assessments consist of four components:
- Hands-on performance tasks
- Constructed-response investigations
- Open-ended questions
- Enhanced multiple-choice questions
PASS aligns to individual disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and cross-cutting concepts in the Next Generation Science Standards, and efforts are underway to bring PASS fully into alignment with NGSS.
What Makes This Service Unique
PASS will provide a deep understanding of:
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- The science assessment development and validation process that results in valid and reliable measures
- Next Generation Science Standards and the need for three-dimensional science assessments
- The strong connections between learning goals and assessments — both formative and summative assessments
- Assessment as an integral part of instruction and learning
- Providing results that are useful and informative to states, districts, teachers, and parents
PASS brings a broad range of expertise in all aspects of design, development, scoring, and reporting, from science teachers, to researchers, to measurement specialists. In addition, PASS meets state, district, school, and research project needs by customizing assessments to meet individual needs.
Cost
For information on pricing, please contact Robin Montoya at 650.381.6465 or rmontoy@wested.org.
Learn More
To learn more, please contact Robin Montoya at 650.381.6465 or rmontoy@wested.org.