After 24 years in the K-12 education space, Achieve has shut its doors. Read the statement from Michael Cohen, President of Achieve here.
Our website www.achieve.org will remain available through December 31, 2020.
Former Achieve science team members have founded the NextGenScience project at WestEd where they will continue working with educators and partners across the nation to improve the quality of science education. Please visit their website and @NextGenScience to learn more about their work. They will continue to serve as stewards of the NGSS, sharing resources with the field through the nextgenscience.org website, NGSSNow newsletter, and @OfficialNGS.
All students should graduate from high school ready for college, careers, and citizenship.
Transforming Science Assessment: Challenges and Recommendations for States
Download a PDF of the brief here.
Since 2013, 39 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) or similar standards based on the National Research Council’s A Framework for K-12 Science Education, signaling a commitment to high-quality and rigorous science education for all students. States’ previous science standards took traditional approaches to science, emphasizing students “knowing” disconnected science facts and decontextualized, procedural skills. In contrast to standards that emphasized one aspect of science at a time, states’ new science standards are three-dimensional, and integrate disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), science and engineering practices (SEPs), and crosscutting concepts (CCCs) into performance expectations that require students to demonstrate knowledge-in-use as they make sense of realworld phenomena and solve authentic problems. This brief describes some key challenges associated with developing assessments for these new standards, and recommendations for states to consider.
