Next Generation Assessment for STEM Learning
The inquiryHub team works with educators and leaders to co-design, adapt, and use high-quality STEM assessments that support student learning.
We focus on assessments that directly inform and support more equitable STEM learning that are both aligned with the standards and engaging for students. We offer:
Workshops and courses for designing phenomenon-based, learner-centered assessments of three-dimensional state standards.
Strategic support for school, district, and state leaders to build local capacity for designing coherent and equitable assessment systems.
OpenSciEd-Focused Assessment workshops for adapting and using the full range of OpenSciEd assessments, feedback and grading, and use of student experience data to promote more equitable class participation and support learning outcomes.
Why We Focus on Transforming Assessment
Here are three common pitfalls of assessments that our workshops address:
Assessment and grading plans aren’t aligned with learning goals. Our workshops help teachers make the big shifts in assessment demanded by next generation standards, and they help teachers create grading systems that are focused squarely on learning goals.
Assessments undermine relationships instead of strengthen them. For students, assessment can be stressful. For parents and caregivers, grades don’t say enough about what their students know and can do, or help them know how to help. Our workshops show how to use assessment, feedback, and grading to improve learning, build caring relationships, and promote better communication among teachers, parents, caregivers, and schools.
Misaligned common assessments and student information systems interfere with equitable learning. Even when classroom assessments help students effectively show what they know and can do, misaligned interim and common assessments and student information systems interfere with teachers’ efforts to promote more equitable learning. Our workshops help leaders understand how to build more coherent assessment systems and use adopted technologies to support school and district goals for learning.
The inquiryHub Approach to Assessment
We support our partners to build capacity both to design and use assessments.
We make all of our tools and resources freely available and adaptable under a Creative Commons license.
We partner with state, district, and school leaders to help them design common and curriculum-linked assessments to fit their local context.
We draw on a co-created, evidence-based approach for helping teachers to design their own three-dimensional science assessments that connect to students’ interests and identities.
We rely on widely used tools our team developed for integrating science and engineering practices and the crosscutting concepts of science into assessments.
How We Partner with Schools & Districts
We recognize that changing assessments is challenging work, and we are here to help bridge the gap in a way that honors teachers as professionals while building new ways to assess, provide student feedback, and grade student learning in ways that motivate students and build more caring relationships among teachers, students, and caregivers.
We partner with schools and districts to co-design cycles of collaborative teacher inquiry into their teaching practice. In these cycles, teachers look together at data they collect – from student work and also from surveys of student experience – and learn new approaches to identifying strengths in student work, providing feedback to motivate deeper learning, and improving equity of participation.
We bring a compassionate lens to assessment and to professional learning with educators.
Benefits of Our Approach
By partnering with inquiryHub on STEM assessment:
District leaders can build system-wide capacity for educators so that they can provide the most innovative and high-quality learning experiences for all students that improves consistency between classroom and district-level assessments.
School leaders can offer locally adaptable, comprehensive professional learning experiences by building the capacity and confidence of teachers.
Schools can develop more effective routines for organizing teacher work groups and professional learning communities.
Teachers can improve their capacity to design standards-aligned assessments that connect to students’ interests and identities.
Teachers can make shifts in their instruction, so that students are engaged in more active sensemaking.
Teachers can improve the quality of students’ experience in class.
Teachers can make better use of assessments embedded in OpenSciEd instructional materials.
Teachers can develop feedback and grading plans that promote better communication among caregivers, students, and teachers and that are better aligned with learning goals.
Free Resources
Check out the STEM assessment resources developed by our team on the Contextus website
Look at examples of high-quality assessments we developed for OpenSciEd and survey questions we ask to elicit student experience
Try out our free tools for “5D” assessment design developed in partnership with BSCS Science Learning
While slide decks and resources from the curriculum and professional learning materials are free and available for anyone to use, they are most effective when used with a trained facilitator.
Work With Us
Meet With Us
Request a quote and learn more about implementing next generation STEM assessments in your classroom, school, or district
Join Us
Find an upcoming professional learning workshop or event
Contact Us
Co-plan a series for science ed leaders in your state to use an NGSS Toolkit for Assessment or arrange for a course on 5D Assessment co-led with BSCS Science Learning