NGSS formative assessment in middle school science

Abstract

School districts across the country are in the process of adopting the Next Generation Science Standards, or a version of them. This will significantly change the way we teach as well as the content we teach in the years to come. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of instruction in the three dimensions of the Next Generation Science Standards on student academic achievement as well as student comfort with crosscutting concepts and science and engineering practices language. It was found that there was a significant improvement in student comfort and use of language. While there was not a significant increase in content knowledge, students showed improvement in Claim-Evidence-Reasoning paragraph writing.