What do Middle School Students Tell Us About Science Classroom Assessments?

• In Event: Centering Teacher and Student Voice in Classroom Assessment Design: Possibilities and Tensions Between Research and Reality

Abstract

Objectives
To achieve a vision of science learning where learners’ interests and identities are integrated into sensemaking around real-world phenomena (NRC, 2012; NASEM, 2024), we must better understand how to design and work within equitable, coherent assessment systems (Shepard et al., 2018). We explore one approach to designing science assessments that (re)center learners’ interests and identities.
Theoretical Framework
We draw on culturally sustaining approaches (Alim & Paris, 2017) that emphasize responding to and sustaining the knowledge and practices of youth as essential educational goals, particularly of youth who have historically been underrepresented or marginalized from school or science (Randall, 2021). Assessments can help learners make meaningful connections to their interests and science-linked identities (Penuel et al., 2019) and include metrics of experience (NASEM, 2024) that help surface the voices of learners.
Methods
We draw on student experience data from 520 middle schoolers from across the U.S. who each completed two of eight 6th grade, Earth science tasks in the pilot phase of a larger project to validate a pool of standards-aligned middle school assessments for use with high-quality curricula. Students provided demographic information, completed two phenomenon-based assessments, and responded to ‘experience’ items for each task. We focus on the ‘Relevance’ and ‘Liked’ items described in Table 1, and the tasks in Table 2. We particularly elevate the voices of historically underrepresented and marginalized populations, and will report on the full data set in the paper.

Results
Our preliminary analyses show that the majority of students found the tasks relevant, selecting self, family, friends, and/or community 56% (n=520) across the eight tasks. We also notice differences between individual tasks (Figure 1), and are beginning to explore these differences with the open-response items. Preliminary grounded coding of the ‘Liked’ item has surfaced the following themes: Multimodal representations (e.g. images), multiple ways for demonstrating understanding, opportunities to think and share ideas, use of prior knowledge/skills, and interesting topic. To illustrate interesting topic, one Hispanic or Latine student who selected ‘self’ for the Rubber Ducks task (with lowest relevance ratings) said, “It was fun because I never knew that 30,000 ducks were all over the ocean,” while another who selected all relevance categories, wrote, “Que analizaba y aprendí de cómo funcionan las corrientes del océano pacífico,” demonstrating, opportunities to think and use of prior skills.
Our initial exploration reveals what students may find relevant and what they may like in taking the assessments and it surfaces tensions with assessment developers’ designs for students. Though we have more to explore with these data, as white assessment researchers, we seek to diversify whose voices are represented and inform our forthcoming revisions. Further, while we are committed to elevating the voices of underrepresented students, we do not wish to essentialize, amplifying the need for further and thoughtful analyses.
Significance
This work highlights a possibility for centering learners’ voices in decisions around science classroom assessment by including metrics of experience to inform assessment (re)design.

Authors

• Clarissa de Oliveira Deverel-Rico, BSCS Science Learning

• Patricia Olson, BSCS Science Learning

• Cari F. Herrmann-Abell, BSCS Science Learning

• Christopher D. Wilson, Biological Sciences Curriculum Study