Cari F. Herrmann-Abell

Developing and Using Distractor-Driven Multiple-Choice Assessments Aligned to Ideas About Energy Forms, Transformation, Transfer, and Conservation

This chapter presents a summary of middle and high school students’ understanding of energy and the differences and similarities in the ideas that the middle and high school students hold. The student data are a result of the field testing of items aligned to ideas about forms of energy, energy transformations, energy transfer, and conservation of energy that were administered to 23,744 middle and high school students in 48 states across the U.S. between 2009 and 2010. Rasch modeling was used to analyze the data, and the data had a good fit to the model. Analysis of covariance, controlling for gender and English as the student’s primary language, showed a steady increase in student understanding of key energy concepts between 7th and 12th grades. Option probability curves provided additional information about the progression of students’ understanding of energy concepts and the persistence of a number of energy-related misconceptions.

Toward High School Biology: Helping Middle School Students Understand Chemical Reactions and Conservation of Mass in Nonliving and Living Systems

Studies have shown that students struggle to understand basic chemical concepts and have trouble applying these concepts to biological phenomena. This article describes the development and evaluation of a unit to help middle school students connect core ideas about chemical reactions to the phenomenon of growth in animals and plants.

Designing for the Next Generation Science Standards: Educative Curriculum Materials and Measures of Teacher Knowledge

ABSTRACT Focusing on the science knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge that teachers need to realize the vision of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in their classrooms, this article presents findings from efforts to (a) adapt existing criteria and design heuristics for educative features of curriculum materials and apply them in the development of materials to support NGSS and (b) develop an authentic measure of teachers’ knowledge and practice based on an analysis of teachers’ evaluations of their students’ written explanations of phenomena. The study demonstrates that existing criteria and heuristics for designing educative features of curriculum materials can be used productively, with minor modifications, to design features that support teachers in their use of materials that support NGSS. It also provides quantitative and qualitative data to show that teachers’ analyses of the explanation task produced useful information about their understanding of the science ideas targeted in the assessment; of the misconceptions their students held; and of their students’ ability to reason from evidence, science ideas, and models in explaining phenomena. This study builds on and contributes to a body of work on the design and use of educative curriculum materials and the evaluation of teacher knowledge. It suggests a practical approach to the design of NGSS-aligned curriculum materials that support both student and teacher learning based on findings from analysis and empirical studies.