Assessment is for Students
An assessment shouldn't just be for the teacher to determine what students know. It should be relevant to students, as well as provide a sense of ownership over the learning process and an opportunity to develop confidence in articulating the new knowledge. In this project, students will be designing, building, and testing a cargo container which can keep an egg intact and contained in a head-on collision. This project will be connected to real world applications, such as the safety features in cars, to provide a context for the task. Students will also have multiple opportunities to develop and document their own ideas for use in the product as well as to practice justifying their ideas using the science content. Through the use of a journal on Google Drive which can be shared with the teacher, as well as informal oral interactions throughout the project, I will be able to provide feedback to students to help them develop their skills and confidence in communicating the connection between Newton's Laws and their design decisions. In addition to developing their own design ideas, students will have opportunities to plan their own tests on materials or prototypes as well as determine their own design process within certain limits.
Assessment is Faithful to the Work Students Actually Do
In order to represent what students are doing, assessment should include the process students are following, not just the final product they produce. As part of this, students should have opportunities to reflect on and discuss their work as the project progresses. In order to meet this element, I've included both an individual and a team journal as formative assessments. Throughout the project, students will be presented with prompts to reflect individually on various aspects of the content and the process. Entries in the team journal will be produced through discussion within the group.
Assessment is Public
In order for the assessment to be public, students should have input in developing assessment tools, the criteria should be accessible to students throughout the project, and the performances should be viewed by a broad group of people. In this project, students will be designing and building a cargo container to protect an egg in a collision. As part of the entry even for the project, students can help to set the criteria for what is considered a successful design. These criteria will then be available on a class website throughout the project.
As a summative assessment, each group will deliver an oral presentation summarizing their design process and evaluating the performance of their final product. While I will develop the rubric for assessing these presentations, I will review it with students at the start of the project and make sure a copy is available on a class website so students will have a clear idea of what is expected of them. These presentations will not only be done in front of the rest of the class, but an engineer from a nearby company will be invited to give the students feedback to ensure several perspectives.
Assessment Promotes Ongoing Self-Reflection and Critical Inquiry
Students and teachers alike should be able to communicate what a quality product looks like, as well as how students can get there, and the expectations for a quality product should reflect what professionals in the field would produce. By establishing clear criteria for each of the major assessments in the project and discussing those criteria with students, each of us should develop a clear idea of what students should be striving for. In time, I also intend to build a library of exemplars of student work which can add further depth to these discussions. The products, in particular the oral presentation and journals, are based on what professional engineers produce as part of their jobs in order to give students a simulated taste of what an engineer does.
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