With the 2015 adoption of the Michigan Science Standards, reliant on the Next Generation Science Standards, the State of Michigan has effectively decided to dramatically change the way our students learn science. From kindergarten through high school, the goal is to make science education more closely resemble the actual thinking and processes our scientific communities partake in on a daily basis. The A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas and the Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States were designed to guide instruction in order for students to make sense of their natural and engineered worlds as they explore various phenomena and design problems.

Traditional science assessments are not very effective in capturing evidence for this type of student learning. The vast majority of assessments tend to capture only factual information that students have memorized. With this shift in instructional purpose, it is inevitable that we will have to shift our assessments to capture evidence of this new goal; understanding what our students can do.

The following assessment resources are meant to provide you with more insight into some of these assessment changes as well as tools to begin transforming your journey.