Supporting Student Learning through Assessment Activities

Educational programs are situations where the goals for learning are to be realized. Our Assessment Activities are designed to assist in the attainment of targeted learning goals. Students who participate in our Scientific Inquiry and Discovery Activities are making observations and providing descriptions, and building and testing inferences concerning natural phenomena that have been specially chosen to be a productive field for exercising the capabilities related to those learning goals. For these reasons it is assumed that students who engage in these activities are learning something concerning the phenomenon and the targeted capabilities (meta-learning). This assumption of course needs to be tested.

These assessments are enjoyable – Students who take part in our Assessment Activities show signs of engagement, curiosity, and being open to challenges. Perhaps our greatest compliment came from a disadvantaged, disenchanted, and typically disruptive student who became absorbed in teasing out characteristics of pendulum periodicity for most of a class period and then remarked: “I felt like a scientist while I was working on this.”