27 March: Breakout session - Science Escapes the Lab, So How Do I Measure Success? - Chris Warnecke

Synopsis from conference document:


This session will look at using common software applications to design an authentic, unit- or year-culminating performance assessments, commonly referred to as Cornerstone Assessments, that optimally evaluate student understanding. Participants will construct a multi-faceted, real-world activity that includes many different modes for assessing student achievement. Participants will simultaneously design the rubrics for the different modes and develop spread-sheets that incorporate numeric representations of student results. While this session will be offered from a Science perspective, the content is applicable across every discipline. Experience with Pages and Numbers are essential but experience with rubrics and UBD, while ideal, are not necessary.

[Attended] by Kin Chuah

Chris shared how he approaches in the design of their Science Internal Assessment.
Had a short chat with him after the presentation and found out some information on the projects.

• The project in individual-based
• Student decide on topics for project/task, hence projects are diverse for his classes
• Students have 5 to 6 weeks to complete the project and each week consist of about 2 to 2.5 hours of Science lesson.
• Students are assessed on the following aspects: attitude/display/report/oral
• Besides these cornerstone assessments, students do go through standard pen and paper tests when they are in their year 7 and first half of year 8.
• Simple materials are provided by the school but for other materials students are expected to get their own.  For example, Chris shared that one student wanted to demonstrate how a bicycle can be used to generate electricity.  So he provided him with wires and light bulb but the student has to source for his own bicycle.  In the end, student was able to find a single-wheel cycle from a junkyard.
• One constraint he faced was space as his classroom as shown below has to contain all the projects during the 5 to 6 weeks.

Can we do this in SST?  Definitely, we would probably want to see how this can fit into our curriculum for Lower Secondary.  We could even scope it in such a sense such that we can send the top few projects for competition.