Ideas for Assessing Investigations

Formative Assessment

There are two types of formative assessment for each investigation:

• A formative assessment designed for use with the phenomenon and a driving question board.

• A general purpose formative assessment table with sample questions and some answers. These may be downloaded, customized, and used in presentations and quizzes.

  Students can answer formative assessment questions on whiteboards, or by some sort of student response system. A low tech version is to use ABCD cards. You may download a copy of this card and print one for each student. (See link below). The cards are also available as an app from Western Washington University.
  

Summative Assessment

There are a variety of options for summative assessment:

• Simply score investigation as: complete/incomplete/not attempted.

  • Use a 4-3-2-1-0 scoring rubric for investigation completion :

    4 - complete, and correct

    3 - complete, with some/few errors

    2 - partially complete, partially correct

    1 - incomplete and mostly incorrect

    0 - no attempt

• Use the Investigation Summative Assessment, along with the rubric and scoring guide for the investigation.
  

• Evaluate unique student-generated artifacts, such as a completed Driving Question Board, poster, whiteboard, image, or presentation.
  

• Use Pre/post test scores and assess learning gains.
  

• Use the Investigation Key Questions assessment table , which identifies a short set of questions that can be checked on the student answer pdfs.
  

• Create a custom quiz and allow students to reference their completed investigation while working on the quiz. You may incorporate some of the questions from our formative and summative assessments into your quiz.