Summative assessments based on phenomena can provide teachers valuable data to inform instruction and monitor student progress. NGSS-aligned summative assessments are often one of the most effective ways to final student understanding of grade-level standards, since they are designed to offer students a novel context to apply their learning. Students should be building up their knowledge through your instructional phenomena, but a summative assessment must be designed to ask students to transferring that knowledge to a novel phenomena!
When designing common Summative assessments, it is important to use assessment tasks that leverage authentic, unfamiliar NGSS phenomena. Whereas assessments for formative and diagnostic purposes can use instructional phenomenon, summative assessments must use an entirely novel phenomena! This allows students to engage in inquiry and investigation rather than simply demonstrate their ability to regurgitate facts. Although the novelty of the phenomena is important, there are a few other factors to consider when deciding on what to include in your summative assessments:
- Are you still concerned about assessing students knowledge, independently of the novel application?
- Do students need scaffolding for better access to demonstrate their knowledge around the phenomena’s data, tables, or text?
- Are you assessing a single standard, group of standards in a unit, or is this a semester/course summative assessment?
By incorporating NGSS-aligned summative assessments into the final parts of instruction, teachers can gain valuable insights into student understanding and identify areas of growth. This can help inform instruction moving forward, as well as provide guidance on adaptations needed for your curriculum in the years to come. In future lessons, shoudl you provide more support to help students with applying their understanding of the Disciplinary Core Idea, the Crosscutting Concept, or the Science and Engineering Practice? A well designed summative assessment should provide you with these insights, through the lens of mastery and application to a novel phenomenon!
Overall, summative assessments based on NGSS phenomena are an effective way to capture data on student’s final performance on a standard, unit, or course. If your school has the capacity, we strongly recommend giving common summative assessments across a grade level or subject. Identifying student performance across different teachers and class periods can give enlightening data about which students are making progress and which need more support. Common Summative Assessments provide teachers, schools, and districts with a uniform system for measuring final student performance and enable data rich conversations that lead to informed instructional decisions.
