Assessment as Learning: Role of Students in an Assessment Aided Science Learning Process

The purpose of the current study was to understand how collaborative implementation of specific Next Generation Science Assessment (NGSA) tasks, when used as tools to engage students in multidimensional scientific reasoning, can provide evidence of upper elementary students’ capacity to engage with the essential components of the scientific practice of ‘Engaging in Argumentation from Evidence’ (EAE), as emphasized in the Framework and the NGSS. The study provides multiple forms of empirical evidence regarding upper elementary students’ developing capacity to engage with the essential components of the practice of EAE. For instance, across the four groups of students in the study, the collaborative implementation Task Performance Scores (TPS) demonstrate that students found describing how the evidence supports the claim or how the claim is based on incomplete evidence, more challenging compared to refining a claim based on evidence provided in the task. Similarly, across the four groups of students in the study, the Task Engagement Discourse (TED) units demonstrate that students use a variety of additional elements such as self-identity, common knowledge, lived experiences, and disciplinary proficiency as evidence to correctly or incorrectly support the claim in the task and reason why the evidence supports the claim in the task. While the study does reveal how upper elementary grade students engage with the practice of EAE embedded in the selected NGSA tasks, sustained implementation of this novel classroom-based assessment approach, combined with timely instructional intervention, will be crucial to verify if the change in students’ disciplinary proficiency, as demonstrated across the task implementation, has indeed happened, and if it can sustain in future assessment situations.