Learning by Doing: A Manual for Teaching and Assessing Higher-order Thinking in Science and Mathematics

National Assessment of Educational Progress (Project)

Jan 1987 · Educational Testing Service

About this ebook

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Nation's Report Card, has developed and pilot-tested a variety of hands-on science and mathematics tasks. These tasks were developed as prototypes for use in future national assessments, but the concepts measured and the innovative approaches used are equally suitable for classroom learning. This manual is designed for use by science and mathematics coordinators and teachers to share these techniques. To develop these hands-on activities, NAEP invited the views of science and mathematics educators and worked closely with members of the United Kingdom's Assessment of Performance Unit at Kings College, London University. Tasks were administered as group activities, station activities, and as complete experiments. About 1,000 third-, seventh-, and eleventh-grade students from 12 school districts across four regions of the country were assessed, with approximately 100-300 responses obtained for each task. Results showed that students responded to the tasks, and results conformed to expectations about basic developmental trends in thinking skills. In response to the pilot study, 11 tasks field-tested by NAEP were selected to show a range of possibilities for classroom and assessment use. Each task is presented by thinking skills necessary for successful student performance and the administration mode used by NAEP. Hierarchically arranged tasks are divided into the following sections: (1) classifying; (2) observing and making inferences; (3) formulating hypotheses; (4) interpreting data; (5) designing an experiment, and (6) conducting a complete experiment. The presentation for each task includes a brief explanation of the activity, the student response sheet, a list of the equipment used, and one or more exemplary student responses. (LMO)