Assessment Ideas

Formative Assessment Ideas

Using Wordle to Organize Science Concepts

Wordle can be used as a great educational tool for science class.  There are so many vocabulary words for students to remember.  Learning all these words can be a very daunting task for some.  One idea for using Wordle is to clump together many vocabulary words under one scientific concept.  It would be so easy to create a list of vocabulary words, some matching the concept and some not.  Students would first have to determine which words match and eliminate the others from the list.  Next, they could use Wordle to graphically display the concept and matching vocabulary words.  This would meet the needs of several different learning styles.  This also is a quick way for teachers to assess student understanding.

Example:  Physical Properties of Matter

Exploring Density

Our focus in class last week was density. My students worked on creating a foldable from Middle School Science.  This is probably the best density foldable I've ever used.  I can see my students using it often.  For measuring density and using it as an identification property, we participated in a density cube lab.  Our final density lesson was to create a density column and to watch a Steve Spangler video of the Amazing 9 Layer Density Tower.  I didn't have all of the components to do the 9 layer, but we did make a 6 layer column together instead.