SCALE Science at WestEd provides support in designing and using performance-based assessments to cultivate learner-centered science classrooms. We aim to transform assessment in ways that support science learning for all students.
How We Help
Our approach is driven by the belief that engaging and rigorous learning environments can be achieved through shifts in how schools, districts, and states design and use assessments. We provide direct support for developing the structures and practices needed to elicit and work with students’ ideas, interests, and experiences to advance their thinking.
Assessment Design
We use an evidence-based process to design asset-based, three-dimensional performance-based assessments and innovative rubrics. This work is grounded in our design criteria to ensure that every assessment elicits instructionally meaningful evidence of all students’ progress.
Professional Learning
We provide customized professional learning for developing and using instructionally meaningful assessments to meet school and district priorities around improving science outcomes, developing asset-based and ambitious science teaching practices, leveraging students’ cultural and linguistic resources, and more.
Research
We partner with researchers to explore how teachers learn to use performance assessments to elicit and recognize students’ assets and use them to enact ambitious science teaching practices. We also examine the broader impact of these assessment practices on teaching and learning and the ways school and district leaders spread and sustain their use.
Visit our website to find 3D assessments and other resources.
Service Delivery
- Hybrid, online, and onsite
Who Will Benefit
- Teachers
- School leaders
- District leaders
- State educational agencies
- Curriculum and assessment developers
The work that we’ve been doing in performance assessment…is firmly seated in supporting teachers’ knowledge of students, but it’s really also effective at engaging students in their own learning, ensuring that we as their teachers are being really thoughtful about who are students are and what we want them to do and ensuring our instruction gets them there.
— SCALE Professional Learning Participant
Featured Experts
Jill A. Wertheim
Connecting Research With Practice
New science standards require a new way of assessing learning. Our approach to using assessment as a lever for supporting and strengthening three-dimensional teaching is grounded in decades of research on the powerful impacts of formative assessment practices on improving student outcomes and the need to actively support teachers in developing those practices. This research emphasizes the value assessments can offer for understanding what is or is not working and for whom. However, few teachers feel comfortable using assessments to shape instruction around students’ ideas or to work with their cultural and linguistic assets. Our work explores how the full formative cycle can improve science learning for all students.
More Related to this Service
Resources
Browse our high-quality publications and resources designed to inform and engage professionals in a variety of fields including K–12 education, early childhood, and health and justice.
