Essential Questions and Performance Assessments

Since September, my fellow teachers and myself have been involved in a project with the Alberta Assessment Consortium. We've been learning how to create good performance assessments.

Our certified staff decided we would create and plan for a performance assessment in Science as it is sometimes the most difficult to plan for in a multi-grade classroom, due to the wide range of unit themes there are across the curriculum and throughout the grades.

We first looked at the curriculum and created the essential questions we would answer at the Grade 3, 6, and 9 levels.

For Grade 3:
- How do living things grow in order to adapt to their environments?
- What characteristics of rocks and soil make them useful in the community?
- What decisions need to be made in order to create the best product possible?
- What makes sound, sound?
For Grade 6:
- How can humans make informed decisions about their actions on a forest ecosystem?
- How can we pose questions and make inferences based on investigated evidence?
- How can we use what we know about air and aerodynamics to construct working flight models?
- How does the position of the Earth in the universe affect humans?

For Grade 9:
- How can humans make informed decisions about their actions on ecosystems and the global environment?
- Why is it important to understand reactions of matter in your environment?
- How has the development of technologies contributed to the exploration and understanding of space and the to the benefits on Earth?

Once we had the essential questions formulated, we took the outcomes according to the Alberta curriculum from Grades 1 to 9, cut and pasted them along a continuum so that they would lead to answering the questions above. We then decided to create a performance assessment that would cover as much of the curriculum as possible while going deep into the learning in order to answer the essential question we decided to focus on during this project.

The essential question I wanted to answer in my Grade 1,2,3 classroom was dealing with the construction of a product that could serve a real life purpose. Because there is a unit of study in grade 2 as well as Grade 3 dealing with construction, and because the Grade 1's in this class were very hands on oriented, and could use some instruction and  review in using the tools and materials involved, I chose to create a performance assessment that would link the product creation essential question to something very real in their lives.

Now that we have completed the construction process and are reflecting on the skills developed during this project, I can see that some of the students were stretched in the area of directly related skill development. More importantly, several of the students exhibited growth in confidence and were able to throw out some of their ideas and begin again without the previously exhibited temper tantrums.

This was huge for them and for me!