From Seed to Seed:
Plant Science for K-8 Educators
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From Seed to Seed: |
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C. Opportunities for Assessment Although no formal assessment activities are included in this course, each activity has several opportunities for embedded assessment. To begin, we recommend evaluating the products of your students' work. For example, in many of the activities, students write, record observations, and/or make sketches in a journal. In addition to enabling you to understand students' thinking, the journal serves other purposes. It allows students to record their thoughts and organize the information that they have gathered. Many students take pride in their journals and will spend extra time improving their entries. So let the creative juices flow! By keeping a journal, students are also actively participating in an important part of the scientific process. They record their thoughts (or hypotheses), observations during the investigative process, questions, and results. This enables them to draw inferences and conclusions and to think more critically about concepts and processes.
Since we, along with the National Science Education Standards, strongly
encourage teachers to use an inquiry-based approach to science, many of
the activities involve experimentation. Often students will be asked to
modify-or create their own-experimental procedures. A great assessment
technique is to have one group of students repeat another group's experimental
procedure to see if they obtain the same result. This allows you the opportunity
to assess what they have learned; and for your students, it mirrors the
real-world challenges faced by research scientists. |
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