About
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Why We Do What We Do
There is growing appreciation for ways that assessments can do more than simply be an instrument for evaluating students. Assessments can provide insights to administrators, teachers, and to students that guides deeper learning that is meaningful and engaging for students. The SCALE Science Team at WestEd provides targeted support in the design and use of performance-based assessments to cultivate learner-centered and equity-seeking science classrooms.
SCALE Science Design Framework
Our design frameworks for curriculum and assessment are grounded in a performance-based approach. This means that tasks engage students in developing agency around using scientific ideas and practices to address meaningful, compelling, and complex questions and problems about real phenomena. Performances increase in complexity as students work individually or in groups toward constructing explanations or solutions, offering teachers a range of evidence of students’ progress with the dimensions being elicited throughout the task. Our design framework guides our development process and professional learning to ensure that everything we do supports equitable instructional practices that center students.
For information on ways that we support schools, districts, states, and developers in developing and/or using performance assessments n science, visit our services page or contact us.
Our History
SCALE Science at WestEd was originally the science curriculum and assessment group at the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE), which was founded by Ray Pecheone and Linda Darling-Hammond. For nearly 20 years, SCALE was nationally and internationally recognized as a leader in innovation around performance assessment. SCALE’s Principles for High-Quality Performance Assessment continue to form the foundation of our work in science assessment.
Beginning in 2014, SCALE collaborated with A K-12 Framework for Science Education authors Helen Quinn and Jonathan Osborne to create the Stanford NGSS Assessment Project (SNAP), a R&D program funded by the S.D. Bechtel, Jr Foundation to develop a model system of assessment that could do more than simply evaluate students, but provide crucial supports for NGSS teaching and learning.
At the end of 2020, SCALE sunsetted at Stanford but the work we had begun with SNAP was thriving. States and districts across the country were using our resources to re-think how students’ learning should be measured. So, our small science performance assessment team moved to WestEd to expand the ways we were supporting states and districts were designing and using assessments.
Many of the assessments, design tools, and professional learning resources shared by SCALE Science at WestEd were developed as part of our work on SNAP with our SCALE and Stanford colleagues.
