Designing Coherent Three-Dimensional Assessment Prompts to Drive Student Sensemaking Across a Unit

Abstract

Enacting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) reform continues to pose opportunities and hurdles for educators. Across instruction and assessment, the NGSS ask teachers to ground students’ learning in coherent, phenomenon-driven, and three-dimensional (i.e., integrating crosscutting concepts, science and engineering practices, and disciplinary core ideas) opportunities for sensemaking. Instructional and assessment resources to enact this vision have been increasing in number and availability, but they are not yet pervasively available and accessible due to a number of educational system barriers. Our team proposes a concise process that teacher educators might use in preservice and in-service learning settings to help boost this access and bridge instruction and assessment. The scaffolded, educative process is designed to yield both teacher learning and usable bell-ringer prompts for students. The prompts and their educative development process target unit-integrated, phenomenon-based, coherent, 3D bell-ringers that provide formative gauges and practice for students' sensemaking. This article justifies the process in the literature, provides suggestions for teacher educators to use the process in their settings, and embeds an example middle school prompt set collaboratively developed by teacher educators and a teacher. We close in considering how expanding this process might support teacher learning going forward.