The FOSS team is excited to announce FOSSmap 2.0. For those of you who have used FOSSmap through the "proof of concept years," we think that you will be very pleased with the new system.
The FOSS assessment team is excited to announce several new features that will be available next school year (2018-2019).
The FOSS project developed its assessment system through an NSF-funded project ASK. During that six-year project, we worked extensively with teachers in nine school districts and educational service areas to create what has now been embedded in FOSS Next Generation and Third Editions. Some of you may be asking, if those assessments were created before the NGSS existed, how can we use them for gathering three-dimensional data about our students' performance?
If we’re focusing on formative assessment, how are we supposed to give grades?
Formative assessment has become a bit of a buzzword, and like other educational terms it can come to mean many different things.
As many of you know, assessment for the FOSS program has been evolving since the 1990s.
The term “differentiated instruction” can have a variety of meanings in the education world and can refer to many aspects of a students’ learning.
In this issue I'll talk about some of the criteria we use to design items and describe student progress levels based on assessment responses.
Research has shown that frequent formative assessment is a key to improved learning (Black and Wiliam, 1998; Wiliam, 2011). But developing prompts, analyzing test data, and developing next-step strategies can take a significant amount of time. Enter FOSSmap.
When teachers first begin teaching FOSS, the learning curve can be a challenge. If teachers are making the change from a textbook to an activity-based curriculum, the first year is spent learning content, working out timing issues, preparing materials, and coming to grips with student and kit management. As teachers become comfortable with the mechanics of teaching FOSS, they may focus their creative energy on implementing science notebooks. Students use their science notebooks to record and organize data, define vocabulary words, and write conclusions drawn from investigations. By the third year of using FOSS, the logistics have been mastered, and teachers are ready to focus on student learning. That’s the point where assessment becomes an important part of the curriculum.