The American Museum of Natural History, the Lawrence Hall of Science, and the University of Connecticut collaborated to design, pilot, and field-test a 10-week middle school ecology unit, Disruptions in Ecosystems, and an associated professional development (PD) program that aligned with a bundle of middle school ecology Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) performance expectations and Common Core State Standards. The Moving Next Generation Science Standards into Practice project provides an NGSS-designed model unit that has been not only used in classrooms nationally and available online; but also by others for teacher PD about the Educators Evaluating the Quality of Instructional Products (EQuIP) process; as well as teacher and student assessments. 

This project has deepened knowledge about how to design curricula that support the three-dimensional learning envisioned in the NGSS. The curriculum team developed approaches to scaffolding student learning experiences to promote growth in all three dimensions aligned to the targeted Performance Expectations. These experiences helped to prepare students to engage in sensemaking around concepts and issues in ecology. The second field test edition was submitted for an EQuIP review in 2017, receiving a rating as High Quality NSF Design If Improved, and final revisions have been submitted. The curriculum and design approach has been shared with a wide practitioner and researcher audience through professional meetings. 

The project has also advanced knowledge of professional development design for teacher learning and of the influence of professional development on teachers and students. Throughout the project, the research team deepened their understanding of 1) the specialized knowledge needed by PD facilitators and 2) how to provide teachers with opportunities to engage in and reflect on NGSS-aligned teaching practices. While initially focused upon ensuring that teachers experience the curriculum from a student perspective, we found that shifts in practice required extensive opportunities for teacher practice. We needed more opportunities for teachers to learn about, rehearse, and practice relevant teaching strategies. We incorporated a focus on talk moves and strategies for facilitating student-to-student talk. Initial analysis of a subset of student assessments offered evidence that students improved their competency with constructing explanations and arguing from evidence. In addition, the project team learned the importance of supporting teachers to practice eliciting and building on students' ideas, to integrate all three dimensions, and to allow ample time for student reflection and sensemaking. 

Finally, the project has contributed to our understanding of teacher and student assessment. This project yielded instructional materials and teaching resources aligned with NGSS, and instruments to help researchers and educators track the effects of PD on science teaching and learning. Although initially not part of the project design, the project team saw an opportunity to extend the work of assessment and was awarded supplemental funding to score full sets of assessments from the unit from >900 students to gather reliability and validity data. 

A product of this work is a full set of student exemplars which have been scored, annotated, and compiled into a teacher support document. Teachers found the exemplars and hands-on experience analyzing exemplars to be among the activities that they rated highest in terms of impact on their classroom practice. We anticipate that teachers using the curriculum in their middle school classroom will find the student examples helpful in anticipating the range of student performances one might expect, and productive ways in which to use student thinking on assessments to guide instruction.

The large-scale scoring and analysis of hundreds of middle school student responses to these tasks offer insight into how students? developed competency with Disciplinary Core Ideas related to ecosystems, Crosscutting Concepts, and science and engineering practices, specifically, developing and using models, constructing explanations, and arguing from evidence. We also gained insight into "what works?" (and doesn't) in the development of rich, multi-component NGSS assessment tasks. Specifically, we honed in on particular ways of prompting for explanations and arguments that elicited the target practices. For example, instead of asking for a "rebuttal," we asked for "another idea." And instead of asking for critique, we asked, "What is the problem with that argument?"

For the teacher assessment, we gathered candidate assessment items from the broad array of assessments being used nationwide in research and development projects and created a publicly-available inventory of such items. We completed a crosswalk between NGSS and the identified items, and pilot tested items designed to assess both teacher content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. Our experience is using a responsible and principled, evidence-centered approach to developing assessments with clear validity claims can serve as a blueprint for future assessment development efforts. Because our approach centers responsibility as a guiding principle, the process requires that assessment development and implementation cannot be separate from the work of professional learning that happens both in formal professional development and teachers' classrooms.

Last Modified: 12/16/2020
Modified by: Karen Hammerness