SCALE Science at WestEd

SCALE Science at WestEd’s mission is to support improvements to teaching and learning through the use of innovative, educative, state-of-the-art performance-based assessments. Our approach to assessment is driven by the belief that shifts in how schools, districts, and states design and use assessments can transform them into instruments that teachers and students view as critical to creating an engaging and growth-oriented learning environment. A core set of design principles inform each element of work to ensure that assessments drive equitable, asset-oriented instructional practices while motivating student engagement, creativity, and agency.

Curriculum

SCALE Science created NGSS-designed/aligned, project-based curricula with embedded performance assessments. All of the curricula we developed at Stanford SCALE are shared here are free and can be downloaded for classroom use.

View Curricula

Professional Learning

SCALE Science at WestEd provides customized professional learning to teams of educators and leaders in developing and using assessments to meet school and district priorities around deeper learning, asset-based and equitable instructional practices, and more.

Professional Development

Assessment

SCALE has created tools to guide educators, administrators, curriculum developers and policymakers in the development and use of systems of assessment for NGSS that include performance assessments. Visit this page to find exemplar assessments and rubrics, development frameworks, and more.

View Assessment Projects

Highlights

Free online courses from SNAP

SCALE Science has a series of four FREE online course available to support teams of educators and leaders step-by-step in developing high-quality performance assessments and multidimensional rubrics that center students and equitable instructional practices! For more info about the courses we developed as part of our SNAP project, please visit https://scalescience.wested.org/snap/resources/snap-courses/

Curriculum Update

Stanford NGSS curriculum is free to download and use. Find the units on our Curriculum section.

Recent Publications

When performance assessments are designed to surface students’ ideas, interests, and experiences, they can become the foundation that teachers use to ground their student-centered instructional practices. Read about how we support teachers in using performance assessments as a critical tool for enhancing science instruction.

 

Interested in learning about the SCALE Science design principles and how they are used to guide each step of our principled development process? Read: Criteria for the design of engaging, educative, and equitable science performance assessments: Design Criteria for the Stanford NGSS Assessment Project (SNAP)

 

 

Videos

Getting All Students to Participate

San Francisco Unified and SCALE have partnered to provide students with groupwork methods and curricular structures for more equitable outcomes.

A Research-Backed Science Curriculum

SCALE Science partners with San Francisco Unified School District to show that learning collaboratively through projects yields results for middle school students.

Teacher about SCALE Science Ed Curriculum:

I love the fact that the students are discovering the concepts rather than me just telling them. They are much more actively involved in their own learning.

Unless otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restricted others from doing anything the license permits.