As students get older, they are often encouraged to write exclusively in words. In science, however, “writing through pictures” is a vital tool for sense-making. Graphics—in the form of diagrams, graphs, drawings, maps, and tables—can frequently communicate ideas in much more complete and complex ways than words alone. As students get older, they also communicate through models—visual representations which may or may not be created with paper and pencil.
When students use graphics to represent their ideas, the process can often help them to clarify their own understandings. Drawing, in particular, can catalyze students’ abilities to develop and verbally articulate new theories and explanations, and to make essential connections. This is true for students from kindergarten through high school.
Exemplary middle-school curricula offer a diverse array of graphic assessment tools that can be used at any point in an instructional cycle. In a unit on heat transfer, students might draw to explain what is happening inside an oven as a cake bakes. In an ecosystems unit, students might diagram all the relationships and cycles within a terrarium. In a force and motion unit, students might create three different graphs that all show an object moving at a constant speed. All of these graphics provide windows into student understanding; in addition, they provide insight into what activities will best serve students’ learning needs.
Learn more about the types of graphic assessments used on standardized tests.
The following vignettes are fictionalized classroom accounts of real assessments from real middle school curricula.
Drawings
Ms. Sidwell’s class is exploring what it feels like to be a structure through a sixth-grade Insights unit. Specifically, they are investigating two of the forces that cause structures to behave in the ways they do: tension and compression. Working in groups, Ms. Sidwell’s students must solve a set of challenges that put their own bodies in tension and in compression. For example, one challenge asks students to arrange three people with arms in compression. After they have solved each challenge, students must draw a picture of what they did. In their drawings, they use one color to show compression and another color to show tension. These coded drawings help Ms. Sidwell’s students effectively communicate and debate their ideas with one another.
Learn more about this example of Drawings, an embedded assessment from the Insights curriculum.
Diagram
As part of an EBS unit, sixth-grader Dashawn has just been hired by a fictitious aeronautical design company to build an airplane for the big Air Show. Today, he is exploring how wing and tail alterations influence the flight of a paper airplane. He is using paper clips, tape, and additional paper to investigate changes in wing and tail shape and weight. Changing just one variable at a time, he is carefully recording each flight path: Which one makes the best right turn? Which one produces the best dive? He records all the flight paths in his science journal, and then must summarize his results in a memo to a children’s magazine (which is preparing an article about how paper airplanes fly). In his memo, Dashawn includes a detailed diagram of his best design. Drawing the diagram helps Dashawn articulate in words how and why the design works.
Learn more about this example of a Diagram, an embedded assessment from the EBS curriculum.
