Science News and Links
NEXT GENERATION SCIENCE STANDARDS (RESOURCE)
A Framework For K12 Science Education (NRC Resource)
ACT Aspire is replacing Benchmark Assessments for grades 5,7, and EOC. Science will be administering the ACT Aspire Assessment in grades 3-10 beginning in the 2015-2016 school year.
The ACT Aspire will focus on student understanding of how science works and less about recall of science facts. The ACT Aspire tests for grades 3-10 assess science in three categories:
· Interpretation of Data
· Scientific Investigation
· Evaluation of Models, Inferences and Experimental results.
It’s all about assessing science process skills (the practices/crosscutting concepts). So the more that students are engaged in doing science (with content from our current Science Curriculum Frameworks or the new AR K-12 Science Standards) the better the scores should be. The focus should be on implementing engaging science instruction in every grade starting in Kindergarten.
Students will have 55 minutes for the science portion of the assessment.
The following information was found at http://www.discoveractaspire.org/assessments/test-items/
ACT Aspire - ADE
This is a link to a live binder that contains information from the Arkansas Department of Education concerning all of the testing.
