Web Seminar Series

Do you want to design an engaging, three-dimensional assessment that you can use in your classroom that is connected to your instructional materials and coherent from the perspective of your students?

Join us and work together to redesign a classroom assessment task you can try out with your students using our new NGSS Task Design Workbook and an assessment task you bring with you or select from our curated list of openly available examples. Using lessons we have learned from over 10 years of NGSS assessment design, we will highlight key elements of 3D assessment design—centering sense-making, problematizing phenomena, ensuring tasks truly assess your targets at grade-level, and including accessibility features that allow all students to make their thinking visible— that distinguish high quality assessments. These high-leverage elements of task development will prepare you to adapt and design assessment tasks that center your students and engage them in using the 3Ds for sensemaking. We will also gauge the interest of the group and make space to dig deeper into the development and use of 3D assessments, consider what it means to provide useful feedback to students, share lessons learned from pilot schools developing curriculum aligned assessments, and share tangible resources to use with your students.  

Goal: Adapt/redesign an existing assessment for use in the science classroom

We will work to answer questions that drive task design such as:

• What does it mean to engage students in 3D sensemaking? 
• What types of phenomena are meaningful and engaging to students? 
• How do we problematize phenomena to engage students in figuring out? 
• How do we know if students are using the 3Ds in grade-appropriate ways?
• How do we design our tasks to be accessible and engaging to all students?

Program dates and times:

The four live web seminars was held on February 21 and ran through to March 13, 2024.   

During the topic study participants have access to:

• A moderated private forum for group discussions with other topic study participants
• Digital resources and all NSTA online community tools (My Library, My Profile, Community Forums)
• All archive versions of the web seminars to watch on-demand.

Participants will receive a certificate from NSTA after each live web seminar for (1) attending the live program AND for (2) completing the post-program survey.

Send your questions to ([email protected]).

Groups of teachers:

Science Leaders Can Sponsor Groups of Educators!  Are you a state, district, or school leader working to enhance your teachers' professional learning?  Please consider sponsoring a cohort of teachers to participate in the Designing Equitable, 3D, Curriculum-Anchored Assessments: Topic Study for K-12 Teachers!

Cost to groups:

• $1,500 flat fee per cohort of 25 participants, regardless of their NSTA membership status. Additional participants (beyond 25) will be charged $60 per person.

If you are interested in sponsoring a group of at least 25 individuals, please contact Flavio Mendez via email ([email protected]) for a quote.

Note: Rates below are for individual registration only.