FOSS K-8 Assessment System

Teachers who use hands-on methods of teaching have known for years that their students were learning science. Now FOSS has tools to provide evidence of learning—a fully integrated assessment component that permits continual monitoring of student progress during a module as well as summary information on student performance. The methods range from totally unobtrusive observation of students while they engage in their science investigations to tightly designed evaluative tools. It all adds up to a very thorough look at student achievement.

What do we want to know about student learning? This is the fundamental question that the FOSS team had to answer before developing the assessment program. After lengthy consideration three dimensions of learning, called assessment variables, were identified.

1. Content Knowledge
What do students know about the natural world? What can they report about objects and organisms and the principles that govern natural events? Content knowledge is one important goal of the FOSS program, and a substantial number of tools and strategies are used to acquire data about students’ content acquisition.

2. Conducting Investigations
The enterprise of science is characterized by a number of activities that serve the purpose of acquiring information about the natural world. These include systematic observations, experimentation, equipment design, data organization, and much more. Can students conduct investigations to obtain data and extract meaning from those data? The FOSS program has performance assessments incorporated into the investigations to provide information about this important dimension of student growth.

3. Building Explanations
Making sense out of experiences and incorporating that sense into an ever-deepening knowledge of the natural world is the highest order of achievement FOSS expects to provide for students. At this level of understanding students can put their knowledge to work to solve problems and make considered decisions that will affect how humans relate to the natural world. The process of generating explanations exercises the mind in ways that have implications for reasoned thinking in all aspects of school and life. The FOSS program has tools to assess this dimension of learning and discourse.