A CBAL™ SCIENCE MODEL OF COGNITION: DEVELOPING A COMPETENCY MODEL AND LEARNING PROGRESSIONS TO SUPPORT ASSESSMENT DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Since its 1947 founding, ETS has conducted and disseminated scientific research to support its products and services, and to advance the measurement and education fields. In keeping with these goals, ETS is committed to making its research freely available to the professional community and to the general public. Published accounts of ETS research, including papers in the ETS Research Report series, undergo a formal peer-review process by ETS staff to ensure that they meet established scientific and professional standards. All such ETS-conducted peer reviews are in addition to any reviews that outside organizations may provide as part of their own publication processes. Peer review notwithstanding, the positions expressed in the ETS Research Report series and other published accounts of ETS research are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Officers and Trustees of Educational Testing Service.Find other ETS-published reports by searching the ETS ReSEARCHER database at http://search.ets.org/researcher/ To obtain a copy of an ETS research report, please visit AbstractThe purpose of this report is to describe a science competency model and 3 related learning progressions, which were developed by applying the CBAL™ approach (Bennett & Gitomer, 2009) to the domain of middle school science. The Cognitively Based Assessment of, for, and as Learning (CBAL) science competency model and its related learning progressions were developed by reviewing existing literature on learning sciences and science education, which have placed increasing emphasis on learners' knowledge and ability to apply scientific knowledge to conduct evidence-based reasoning. In this report, we present the 5 competencies in our science competency model that reflect current efforts in the Next Generation Science Standards and the recent reform-based curriculum to promote integrated and generative understanding. In addition, we report 3 hypothesized learning progressions related to our competency model to define the increasing sophistication of both content understanding and the capacity to carry out scientific inquiry. Then we discuss features of assessment prototypes developed under the guidance of the competency model and the learning progressions, by illustrating parts of 1 sample formative assessment task prototype.Key words: science competency, competency model, learning progressions, cognitively based assessment, formative assessment, summative assessment ii AcknowledgmentsWe would like to acknowledge our colleagues Joseph Ciofalo and Kietha Biggers for their help with the project. We would also like to thank other colleagues-Randy

The challenges of alignment for the Next Generation Science Standards

“…Others appear to interpret integration as the application of scientific practice in the disciplinary context, or even simply the ability to use or apply understanding of a DCI or CCC (Debarger et al, , Pellegrino et al, ; Wertheim et al, ). This idea of knowledge‐in‐use as integration is also implicit in some work on project‐based learning as an instructional strategy that aims to align with NGSS (Liu et al, ).…”

“…It matches the idea of curriculum coherence as successively connected disciplinary ideas (Hadenfeldt, Neumann, Bernholt, Xiufeng, & Parchmann, ; Fortus & Krajcik, ; Schmidt, Wang, & McKnight, ), scientific practices (Osborne, Henderson, MacPherson, Szu, Wild, & Yao, ; Yao & Guo, ), or crosscutting concepts (Fick, ) that go across grades and courses. Some sources use this LP basis to guide planning for curriculum and pedagogy (Nordine et al, ; Pruitt, ), whereas others focus on assessments (Gotwals & Songer, ; Liu, Rogat, & Bertling, ; Pellegrino et al, ), and there is emerging published work that addresses curriculum, professional development, and assessment (Wyner & Doherty, ). Given the limited curriculum space in any year, attention to LPs across years could help to guide planning to be more coherent and, thus, more focused in the selection of topics.…”

Key Practices in the English Language Arts (ELA): Linking Learning Theory, Assessment, and Instruction

“…The resulting assessment resembles a performance task (because it provides a context and purpose for all the specific tasks that it contains), but it has many of the advantages of a traditional standardized test because it measures targeted skills through a series of separate items. CBAL researchers have been developing the case for SBAs for some time, both within ELA (O'Reilly & Sabatini, ; O'Reilly & Sheehan, ; Sheehan & O'Reilly, ) and in other content domains (e.g., Graf, Harris, Marquez, Fife, & Redman, ; Liu, Rogat, & Bertling, ).…”

A Historical Survey of Research Regarding Constructed-Response Formats

“…The process entailed the formulation of competency models for specific domains, including reading (Sheehan and O'Reilly 2011), writing , mathematics (Graf 2009), and science (Liu et al 2013); the elaboration of constructs, especially writing ; and innovations in automated scoring (Deane 2013a, b;Fife 2013) and task design (Bennett 2011;Sheehan and O'Reilly 2011).…”