All educators engage in formative assessment; however, to ensure educators are fostering equity in how diverse learners experience learning, the assessment toolkit needs to be expanded. Science education, like all other aspects of society today, has persistent issues of inequity rooted in issues of anti-Blackness, colonialism, and racism; however,…

Cultivating students' scientific knowledge and developing their capability in scientific inquiry depends on a teacher's ability to use existing resources to design rich learning opportunities. Designing such experiences is not easy, and is particularly challenging for new teachers who have little experience making decisions about the best way to…

Many students possess their own unique potential and "genius," but seem to base their worth on the status of grades instead of their connection to education itself. Antonio Salieri, for instance, created wonderful, emotionally binding music throughout his lifetime. Salieri however, never saw the beauty in his work because Mozart, a child…

American classrooms are increasingly heterogeneous linguistically. If all students are to engage in three-dimensional learning, how are educators making classroom assessments accessible and meaningful for emergent bilingual learners? There are few classroom assessment exemplars that embody the NGSS three-dimensional vision of the…

In response to increasingly diverse student groups in U.S. schools, educational researchers have developed curricula that respond to students' unique needs, cultures, and experiences. Curricula that embrace a pedagogy of empowerment are known as Culturally Responsive Curricula (CRC), and such curricula specific to science are referred to as…

One of the standards for life science addressed in the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013) is "Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics" (HS-LS2). A critical concept included in this core idea is biodiversity. To show competency, students are expected to design investigations, collect data, and…

Learning centers can help teachers assess students' content knowledge without penalizing them for language barriers. With the increasing number of English language learners (ELLs) in classrooms, the emphasis on mastery of content and inclusion of all students in class discussions and activities will provide all students a chance for scientific…

Despite the burgeoning numbers of English language learners (ELLs) in our schools, many science teachers have little training in meeting their specialized needs. By the year 2010, it is estimated that 40% of K-12 classrooms in the United States will contain nonnative English speakers with varying levels of proficiency (Thomas and Collier 2002).…

Science teachers are aware of many social issues that intersect with science. These socio-scientific issues (SSIs) are "open-ended problems without clear-cut solutions [that] can be informed by scientific principles, theories, and data, but…cannot be fully determined by [them]" (Sadler 2011, p. 4). This article describes the SSI lessons…

Teachers know what a daunting job it can be to ensure that all students in a class learn effectively. In addition to the usual difficulties of gaining everyone's attention at once, instructors also run into the issue of preferred learning styles. In any classroom environment, the same topic is taught to multiple students, and each student may…

Student attitudes can have a positive or negative effect on learning. According to Duschl, Schweingruber, and Shouse, "[students'] goals for science learning, their beliefs about their ability to do science, and the value they assign to science learning are likely to influence their cognitive engagement in science tasks" (2007, p. 195). Therefore,…

One way of implementing project-based science (PBS) is to use problem-based learning (PBL), in which students formulate their own problems. These problems are often ill-structured, mirroring complex real-life problems where data are often messy and inclusive. In this article, the authors describe how they used PBL in a ninth-grade biology class in…

Science education has moved from the traditional lecture-and-demonstration model toward a student inquiry model. Inquiry activities allow students to discover many relationships of science for themselves. However beneficial this shift may be, former assessment methods used in the traditional model may no longer effectively determine student…

Whole-class inquiry (WCI) assessments range from challenging, paper-and-pencil puzzles to lab-based problems that require students to apply their own gathered data to a new scenario; the latter might also require students to perform a lab with new parameters, or to answer a question using data from a previous lab. In this article, the authors…

Teachers have many dilemmas when it comes to assessing a classroom of diverse students. Teachers need to find out what students really know while being fair to all students. They also need to learn how to alter assessments without watering down content. These challenges can be addressed by following five principles for equitable assessment. In…