Professional Development for Science Assessment

To support educators during their development of new, three-dimensional formative assessments aligned to the NGSS, open educational resources (OER) have been developed as part of a new collaboration called the Advancing Coherent and Equitable Systems of Science Education (ACESSE, or “access”) project.

The ACESSE project is a partnership between the Council of State Science Supervisors, Colorado Boulder University, and the University of Washington. The group has created two-hour-long web-based professional development sessions which include:

Introduction to Formative Assessment to Support Equitable Three-Dimensional Instruction This session is intended to introduce educators to what 3D formative assessment looks like and how equity and social justice goals relate to formative assessment.

How to Assess Three-Dimensional Learning in the Classroom: Building Tasks that Work This session provides an opportunity for educators to begin analyzing, building, and adapting more equitable 3D formative assessments.

The partner organizations encourage educators to both share the resources with their networks, including in a smaller professional learning community, and customize the resources to suit individual school or district needs. More information is available on the STEM Teaching Tools website and the OER Commons platform.