The Importance of Assessments in Carbon TIME

The Importance of Assessments in Carbon TIME

Thank you for agreeing to participate in the Carbon TIME research and development project. We are excited about this project, and we need your help to realize its potential. The first step in the project is to collect some baseline assessment data about your students’ understanding and your own priorities in science teaching.

Assessments play a critical role in the Carbon TIME project. They respond to both needs and opportunities related to improving science teaching and learning:

• The needs arise from new expectations for science learning. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for three-dimensional science learning, which interweaves scientific practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas (content knowledge). Three-dimensional science learning requires teaching that is both responsive to students’ thinking and rigorous in its expectations for student learning.
• The opportunities arise from the extensive research on student learning progressions that are the foundation of Carbon TIME assessments and curriculum design. These assessments will give you insights into the challenges your students face and productive ways for you to respond to these challenges.

Carbon TIME assessments serve two main purposes:

1. Provide student learning data for research purposes, curriculum revisions, and professional development design (for researchers).
2. Provide formative assessment data to guide instruction and summative data to evaluate practice (for teachers).

Baseline, Pre, and Post Tests in Carbon TIME Research

The student test in spring 2015 will provide baseline data about your students’ knowledge of concepts and their ability to engage in practices that are central to the Carbon TIME curriculum. These data will be used by researchers to understand how your current students are achieving Carbon TIME goals and to track learning gains over time. In addition, you will use these data during the face-to-face professional development this summer to plan for the likely strengths and weaknesses of next year's students, and to make instructional decisions such as the depth of information needed in each of the units you will teach.

During the 2015-2016 school year your students will take a pretest (essentially the same as the baseline test, though there are multiple forms) before you begin any Carbon TIME teaching and a posttest after the completion of all your units. This baseline and summative data will help to assess student growth over the entire school year. In addition, students will take shorter, more specific, pre- and posttests before and after each unit.

Carbon TIME is based on a research-based learning progression, which is a framework describing the ways that students develop increasing understandings of a topic. You will learn more about learning progressions both during the Face-to-face Summer Session and during your On-line Course of Study. The learning progressions rubric will help you guide your instruction to assist your students in the maturation of their thinking over the course of the units.

These assessments are tailored to the learning progression that guides the Carbon TIME curriculum. Therefore they uncover students’ ideas in a way that allows both researchers and teachers to understand students’ reasoning about carbon-transforming processes. The questions are different from many traditional assessments in that they are not intended to elicit just “right” or “wrong” answers about specific science facts. Instead they probe students’ reasoning about phenomena (e.g. bread molding, a match burning, plant growing, etc.) to provide information about how students think about carbon-transforming processes. The questions also assess students’ proficiency in the practices of science and their ability to use important crosscutting concepts, especially conservation of matter and energy. In this way Carbon TIME assessments are aimed at what the Next Generation Science Standards calls “three-dimensional learning.”

This assessment design is very helpful for examining the effects of the Carbon TIME curriculum materials and revising them to improve student learning. It is also helpful for teachers as they plan for instruction and reflect on their own teaching practices.

Formative Assessment Tools Embedded in Carbon TIME

My Students’ Answers feature. This summer you will learn to use the My Students’ Answers feature for the overall pretests and posttests as well as the pretests and posttests for each unit. You will be able to download all your students’ responses with forced-choice responses scored, as well guidelines for scoring students’ written explanations and judging the learning progression levels of your students. You will have a chance to use My Students’ Answers for the baseline assessment that your students are taking now during the summer professional development.

Embedded assessments. In addition to the pre and post assessments that are administered online, Carbon TIME includes many formative assessment tools embedded in the curriculum. Each unit includes activities designed to uncover students’ ideas as well as teacher materials with detailed rubrics for assessing students’ answers according to the learning progression. Process tools for scaffolding and assessing students’ explanations of the different carbon-transformation processes provide a familiar framework across units to support students in building their knowledge, as well as a means for teachers to quickly gauge students’ understanding of key concepts.

What to Do Now

You will learn much more about the resources and opportunities of the Carbon TIME project this summer. For now, we ask you to do two things that will help us to understand you and your students better and plan more productive experiences for you in the professional development work this summer. Both tasks can be performed from your online Teacher Dashboard, located within the CTIME Units and Assessments online system. Registration is required to use the Teacher Dashboard (

1. Administer the baseline test to your students who are taking classes most like the classes you will teach Carbon TIME units to next year. You will find instructions for doing this, within the ‘classes’ section of your dashboardat
2. Help us understand your priorities and teaching practices by answering questions in the teacher baseline survey, in the ‘take exams and surveys’ section of your dashboard at

/ Carbon: Transformations in Matter and Energy Environmental Literacy Project
Michigan State University1