Appropriate Assessments for Reinvigorating Science Education

The article says, "We cannot expect major improvements in education without major changes in our assessments of both students and faculty performance."

Science education should be based on inquiry-based learning and problem solving skills. Science is not the memorization of facts or word definitions. Science classes using inquiry-based learning look different, as they are noisy where students challenge each other and the teacher acts as a highly skilled coach.

The article gives an example of an investigation based assessment. This type of assessment tests for abilities that prepare students for the real world, makes school meaningful and helps them for getting and keeping a skilled job.

The following problem was given to all Maryland third graders:

Your teacher has received a bouquet of flowers and is having trouble with them. The leaves are drooping, and the flowers look sick. You decide to do an investigation to discover what might be wrong with them.

Students must then perform the following tasks

1. Read two articles about plants and their stem system

2. Write an essay explaining how you would study your teacher's flower to determine what's wrong with it.

3. Draw an illustration that would help other students understand your investigation.

4. With a partner, use a magnifying glass, look at the cut edge of a bottom of a celery stalk (which is used in place of the flower), make a list of things you observe about the stalk, break the stalk, and describe what you see.

5. Draw and color a picture of what you think will happen to this celery if it sits in red dye overnight. Explain why you think so.

6. On the next day, study the celery that was soaked overnight in the red dye. Write a paragraph to explain how the celery is the same or different from what you predicted yesterday.

7. Write an essay explaining why a scientist might want to do more than one investigation when trying to answer a question about science.

8. Write a note to your teacher telling what you have learned about flowers and how to take care of them.

The article says giving only multiple choice tests does not create interest in students to understand the material. But including short essay answers in assessments definitely change students attitude, because now they have to understand something in order to write something for short essays.

The author says that higher education-faculty of colleges and universities, sets the model for K-12. If colleges and universities use multiple-choice exams, everybody is going to use multiple choice exams. If lectures at universities and colleges only lecture at students with facts and try to cover all the curriculum in one year without teaching anything in depth, high schools will emulate them. Middle schools in turn will emulate the high schools.

The author says stopping lecturing every fifteen minutes to ask a conceptual question and making students to discuss and convince their neighbors they are right, not only keeps the students alert and motivated, but also increases the percentage of students who get the answer right the second time.

In the end the author gives his favorite quote about education "The art of education is never easy. To surmount its difficulties, especially those of elementary education, in a task worthy of the highest genius. But when one considers in its length and breadth the importance of a nation's young, the broken lives, the defeated hopes, the national failures which result from the frivolous inertia with which it is treated, it is difficult to restrain within oneself a savage rage: A country that does not value trained intelligence is doomed."