Developing Classroom Assessment Tasks That Evaluate Students’ Abilities to Plan Scientific Investigations

Designing classroom assessment tasks that can gather meaningful assessment information is a complex undertaking. This is especially the case when it comes to developing assessment tasks to evaluate students’ abilities to plan scientific investigations. Such assessment tasks should adequately elicit students’ cognitive understandings related to designing valid and reliable experiments, not just their hands-on manipulative skills. This article proposes a set of guidelines for developing written assessment tasks that can surface students’ cognitive understandings related to planning scientific investigations. We show how the checklist created based on the design guidelines can be used to analyze two classroom assessment tasks. The guidelines will be useful for teachers as they develop new or modify existing classroom assessment tasks to meaningfully evaluate students’ abilities to plan scientific investigations.