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. We are 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 inform effective, asset-oriented instructional practices while motivating student engagement, creativity, and agency.

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.

Assessment Projects >

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 >

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.

Curricula >

Highlights

Free online courses from SNAP

SCALE Science has a series of four FREE online courses 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!

District Communities of Practice

Building Science Leaders Infographic

SCALE Science and the K-12 Alliance have been collaborating on building leaders’ capacity to transform science instruction and assessment. Read about how this program has impacted leaders across New Mexico from this infographic and dig deeper into the program.

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.

Learn about the SCALE Science design principles for instructionally-meaningful rubrics and how they informed the design of our new rubric model Learning-Centered Rubrics.

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.

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