I Didn't Know My Students Could Do That: The Power of Performance Tasks in Science

 What if your science assessment could also be your most powerful teaching tool — and it was completely free? In this episode, recorded on the final day of the NSTA Anaheim conference, hosts Andrew Kuhn and Patrice Semicek sit down with Deborah Atwell of the Los Angeles County Office of Education and Aneesha Badrinaryan, founder of ABG Learning and Assessment, to explore the ATLAS Task Bank — California's open, free repository of over 1,350 K-12 science performance tasks built around real-world phenomena and three-dimensional learning. From a fifth-grade task about a Native Alaskan community watching its homes erode into the sea, to a student who walked in saying she hated science and walked out wanting to do it again, this conversation makes a compelling case that when students are given something real to figure out, everything changes — including what teachers believe their students are capable of. 

Transcript

Andrew 0:00

Here we are, day three, live from Anaheim. Yeah, live at the NSTA conference. You are listening to NSTA Voices, and we have a very special group of guests with us that are going to wrap up this conference with a bang. What do we say? There are benefactors? Is that the word? Well, bankrollers? There are bankrollers.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Very important people.

Andrew 0:27

Very important. We have been able to be here and be in this space thanks to them and their support of this work and podcasting, their belief in podcasting. Without further buildup, I am going to introduce Anisha and Deb as our guests. Welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Thank you for having us. Thank you. We're so excited to be here.

Andrew 0:46

Yeah, thank you. Would you both please introduce yourselves and your roles and what brought you here?

SPEAKER_03 0:51

My name is Deborah Atwell, and I work at the Los Angeles County Office of Education. And I oversee the STEM Special Projects Unit there. And we have the great opportunity to oversee the Authentic Task for Learning and Assessment in Science Task Bank for the state of California. We're very lucky and we feel very privileged to be able to be part of this project.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

And I'm Anisha Badranarian. I am a principal and founder of ABG Learning and Assessment, which is a little assessment firm or a little boutique firm that does innovative assessment design strategy and prototyping and all kinds of fun things like that. And I have had the great pleasure of supporting California, the state, both the department, the state board, and Deb in really reimagining the California science assessment system. And a foundation to that is Atlas, this task bank that makes performance tasks available to teachers everywhere for free. And we're really excited about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:45

I'm from Pennsylvania, so I don't know anything about this. It sounds very exciting, and I'm a little jealous that you're not working in Pennsylvania yet. But can you tell us a little bit more about like what does the task bank look like? What does that mean? How does how have you reimagined the assessment?

SPEAKER_03 2:00

So the Atlas Task Bank is a statewide repository of K-12 science tasks, performance tasks that can be used instructionally in the classroom for our students. And these performance tasks center student reasoning and sense making. And I want to say it's more than just access to tasks. It's also a very important resource across the state that really helps teachers do the work that they're already doing in their classrooms even better with facilitating student reasoning, engaging them in the science and engineering practices in the NGSS, which of course connects to the concepts, the disciplinary core ideas, and then also the concepts across different tasks.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Many, many people have been thinking about how to transition to three-dimensional teaching and learning and assessment. And assessment can teach it.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

But the harder part is how do you actually assess it and in a mass scale at a state level. So I'm very intrigued.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Yeah, it's it's been a challenge. I've been working on NGSS teaching, learning, and assessment issues basically since the standards came out. I used to be the director of assessment at Achieve when the standards were like first being written. And this has been an issue for the last 13 years. One of the challenges has just been that teaching science is different than how many of us experience science in the classroom, how we were taught to teach science in our own like Ed Prep programs. And so one of the things California has been really trying to do is not only make resources available that teachers can use in the classroom, but make sure that there are resources that are made available that actually demonstrate like directly what teaching three-dimensional sense-making-oriented things look like and how you can surface that student thinking at the intersection of those three dimensions in ways that are authentic and meaningful. And you get the assessment information, but the students experience this as they're learning something interesting and exciting and they're engaging directly in the practices. And so Atlas is really the state of California's first effort to say this is what it looks like. Every single teacher, no matter where you're starting from, can find something here that connects with your practice and it's going to push it forward a little bit. And then you can find something new that you're like, ooh, this was really fun to like maybe try modeling in this way. What if I wanted to get deeper into modeling? I can find that task. And the tasks surface student thinking as they're doing it. You don't need a separate assessment. This is assessment as learning.

Andrew 4:26

I want to I want to make sure that I'm understanding you correctly because I'm all in. It sounds like this is a development of kind of a repository of different options of what am I looking for? What support do I need? Atlas is a spot that I can connect into to kind of pull out more information, more resources, and get more help in that area. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Yeah, you can get tasks that you can sort of see immediately. You both live not in California and you can still access the tasks completely open, completely free to every single person who wants to find performance assessment resources. It is not, we are not trying to gatekeep that from anybody. You can find tasks, you can find student work, you can find the teacher guides that help you implement it. The tasks are all mostly, mostly all available in editable format. So you can be like, ooh, this is cool, but like actually I want to relocate the task in space and time because I want it to be focused on something I'm doing right now. You can just do that to the task. And then there are features in the library. We worked really closely with teachers to really design the library. And there are a ton of features that will either are available now or are going to be made available in the next couple months that teachers can share the edited versions of tasks they make so they can show you what they've done to it. You can collaborate in the library. You can so if you're running a PLC or if you're just you want to collaborate with your friends, maybe in your school or outside of your school context, and you're like, hey, we really want to share and do some work together, you can do that in the library.

SPEAKER_02 5:56

Making like a little community. You can have a little community, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:59

That's what everyone else needs. It can be really hard to be a teacher and feel like you're on an island by yourself. And while I don't think any platform is going to entirely solve that, one of the things we know to be true about performance tasks and teaching three-dimensionally is it's really hard to do by yourself. Yes. And so we wanted to make sure, like, yeah, there are tasks and resources, but that community, that social learning matters. And so that's been really central in the design of certainly the platform, but also to enable the supports around it. And Deb, I know you have.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

Yeah, but it's really hard to also, to your point, to you said earlier, teach in a way that you were never taught. If you haven't experienced this kind of thinking, to be able to come up with a performance task, let alone figure out how to accurately assess it in real time, is something you're taking such a huge weight off of teachers' shoulders. It's phenomenal.

SPEAKER_03 6:54

I think that this is something that teachers cultivate over a series of years, right? And so it's not only perhaps creating a performance task or now finding a performance task that aligns with what you're doing instructionally in the classroom or aligns to the needs of your students, but it's this opportunity to learn in the community, diverse thinkers, to do this well in our classrooms, to center student reasoning and sense making in the classroom. And so I think this intentional focus of creating these tools that help teachers communicate not only in their own grade levels in their own districts, but across districts in specific regions that have similar need with certain communities. I really think the Task Bank has really achieved something very important here. I think bringing that collaboration and communication, making it a central focus is absolutely necessary.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Yeah, we really hope it's a catalyst. Like it won't do everything on its own, but sometimes you just need that little boost so that all of the great work and thinking that's going on has something to sort of leverage to build something greater.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

So it's Yeah. And I love that it encourages. I've subscribed to the theory of like you can only change 10% of your practice in a year to be sustainable. So the encouraging part here is you're like, I'm just gonna learn something cool and I'm gonna change the way I'm thinking about this little part, and then I'm gonna try something deeper. Like, I think that's so key.

SPEAKER_03 8:10

And Atlas is this great stepping stone, right? I can try a short 20 to 30 minute performance task around gathering data about my students' modeling, perhaps. I'd I'd like to have some more data around that SCP. So that little piece of like, it doesn't have to be perfect. I'm gonna try this in my classroom with my students. I'm gonna talk to my neighbor, and then we're gonna start thinking about, oh, let's try another one, right? It's very forgiving in the fact because I think sometimes teachers feel a lot of pressure to get it right the first time, right? But we can, because there are so many tasks with such diverse phenomena, these tasks can be used instructionally throughout the year. And that just gives us an opportunity to keep iterating this again with our students and getting better and better at what we're doing in our classrooms.

SPEAKER_02 8:51

And it also allows for the again, the teachers who haven't experienced this before to kind of let go a little bit and watch their kids flourish. Yes. The one thing that I continue to have conversations with teachers about in Pennsylvania is you've just got to give them the ability to wonder again. And then once you give them the ability to wonder through a natural phenomenon, through a performance task that they're not doing a recipe for, and they're out here exploring and thinking and doing your requests for the bathroom are gonna go down, your requests for fidgets are gonna go down, all of these things are gonna kind of correct themselves. It's not gonna be perfect the first time, it's not gonna be perfect anytime if you're being very honest with yourself, but it gives the teacher an opportunity to say, wait a minute, my kids are so much more focused here and really enjoying this. I need to try this again. So you're getting like in there in such cool and sneaky ways.

SPEAKER_03 9:38

I love it. Two things we always hear when teachers do this with their classrooms for the first time is wow, I didn't know my students could do that. Yes. I'm so surprised because often we have this idea that we must teach the content of the unit before we let them go to problem solve. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

And so that, wow, that aha is really key. Well, I'm gonna pick up on a second thing. You know, I was just watching a student do a performance task recently or trying out some interesting things. And at the beginning of the task session, like she was sort of she was like, I'm not really a science person. I really like writing, I like reading, I really don't like science. And then she engaged in this task with her peers. It was about a real world issue. And at the end, the the researcher sort of asked her, How how excited would you be to do this again? And she was like, Oh my God, I loved this so much. This was the best thing to do.

SPEAKER_02 10:32

She probably didn't realize that's really what science should be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

And she was just like, I got to think, I got to write, I got to talk to other people. And she said, I don't think I knew that science could look like this. And her teacher was in the room, of course, and was like, like, she was tearing up a little bit because she was like, I love how my kids think. And this gave them an opportunity to think in their like unique and interesting ways and have that be valued. And I think that is something you just don't always like appreciate about assessment, but assessment can do that. And if done right. Yes. That's the hard part.

SPEAKER_03 11:08

There's possibility there. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 11:10

I love this.

SPEAKER_03 11:10

You reminded me of my second point, which is that when we center student reasoning, we often hear students say, are we gonna do that kind of science again and art? Like, when are we doing that again? I love that because their reasoning is centered and so they feel agents of their own learning and capable of that, right? Of that problem solving process.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Is there anything more amazing than that feeling when you feel like you accomplished something, you did something, you figured something out? Like, if we can do that more for our young people in not in like teaching and learning, but also in our assessment practice, like how amazing would that be?

SPEAKER_03 11:44

Yeah. When engaging in performance tasks, the level of engagement is so much higher. So much higher.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

Sorry, Andrew, we kind of like edged you. That's a good thing.

Andrew 11:52

I just need to say things every now and then so that they know I'm here. Um but earlier, you had mentioned sense making. And that's what I'm hearing us talk about a lot now. And I think that's such an important pedagogical shift of instead of us giving them the sense, we're allowing them to sense make. So I'm I'm wondering from your perspective, what else is kind of keying components for educators as they're trying to shift themselves to allowing the sense making to happen? Because everything we've said so far is the case. That was not modeled for us. We've not seen it that way. Even in our preparation programs to become an educator, that was not a leading thought process. No. So, what does sense making look like within Atlas? How are you empowering educators?

SPEAKER_03 12:34

I'll reference a specific task because it might be, it might be helpful to put it in a context, right? So we have this wonderful task in the bank called the Interaction of Earth Systems, fifth grade task. And often the way we as teachers have taught the interaction of Earth System is around the water cycle, right? This traditionally that's what we did. This task is really inviting engagement at a different level. It's the context of the task is Shish Mareth, Alaska, a native community that's on Barrier Island, which now with climate change, the ice shelf has melted and they are now unprotected and the storms are worse, and there's a lot of erosion in their homes and their community are literally falling into the sea. And so the this is a real world problem. This community determined whether or not to leave the island and relocate their community on mainland Alaska. And so students are given the context of this task. They see they're invited into the phenomena, right, by looking at a newscast and reading some information about what's happening in Shishmarath, Alaska. And they're asked then to model the interaction of these Earth systems, the hydrosphere, the geosphere, the atmosphere, and how they're affecting the change in each other. It's really amazing. I wish we had some time to look at some of the student work samples from our field test at this task, but it's really interesting how they model, they've identified with this story and they're able to model how, you know, changes in the atmosphere are causing changes in the hydrosphere, which is affecting the geosphere. And that becomes the context for them creating then the closing of that task is they're proposing to the community whether they should stay or move, right? A proposal about based on what they did in the modeling piece. So your point, I've kind of lost sight from your original question, which was what does sense making look like in the classroom, right? It looks nice. It looks active. They worked in groups and teams about how to model. You hear a lot of conversation. You have teachers asking questions and them thinking about how to depict this interaction and what's happening in this community. So it's active. And then you see at the end of the closing of this task, you see students looking at each other's models and thinking about, oh, how did I use arrows to show the interaction? Or, oh, I like the way they labeled or, you know, they explained, or gosh, this one, it's a little difficult to follow what the what's happening, the interaction. And so they're building that metacognition, right? Yeah. And then they're like the next day, can I go back and I would like to change some things on my model by looking and interacting with each other's thinking. And so we see this time and time again when we use this task in the classroom. And so I think that's what sense making looks like, right? Really, it's not us telling them how to model, but we're opening it up for them to model.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

Then I think the thing I would say is when we work with teachers to really think about how do you create opportunities to do that kind of sense making that Deb just described. There are a few things that really help. One is sense making is about figuring things out. If you want students to figure something out, you have to actually give them something to figure out. You can't really lead with something that either they already know or that you already know. And so authentic uncertainty really matters. Authentic uncertainty that somebody really cares about. My least favorite task examples are the things that are like Sam was boiling water on a stove and noticed that the water level declined and wondered why did the water level decline. I'm sorry, Sam. Sam did not wonder. Sam was not wondering. No one is wondering that this is not, that is not an authentic uncertainty. Yeah. But when we create authentic uncertainty, we give students something that matters for them to figure out. And we actually ask questions. We scaffold their thinking. We don't give them the answers, but we think about if I wanted to know more about how the student is thinking about it, what kind of ideas are they bringing to the table? What evidence, both from their lived experience and from whatever we're understanding right now, are they using? What kind of reasoning is driving their thinking? Like if we can think about how tasks and teachers elicit that, and that's the point of the task, not can you tell me what the earth systems are that are supposed to be interacting? But actually, it's can you think about it? We see a completely different set of engagements in the classroom. And that's when we really see like sense making come to life. We see a little bit of a shift in who is the knower and who is the facilitator of learning in a classroom.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

Very hard shift for educators to make. We have been taught from day one that we are the knowers and the imparters of knowledge. So are there ways that you guys are helping, I'm assuming through these tasks, are there ways that you're helping teachers kind of step back or let go or think differently about teaching?

SPEAKER_03 17:17

Yeah, in Los Angeles County, we support a lot of districts with this work. And we really feel that three main conditions have to be in place. First is we need access to high-quality tasks, and we now have that with Atlas, which is wonderful. This is a time saver for teachers who are already taxed with so many pieces of their job. So wonderful. The foundation is in place. Next is the piece about how do we build teacher confidence with facilitating learning versus direct instruction, where we're imparting some kind of knowledge or some ideas to them. And then the third element that I want to just point out is the leadership element, which is making space for this work in their districts, right? Time and space for teachers to collaborate in PLCs around doing this instructionally. But if we go back to that second point about how do we support teachers to balance their instruction with these learning experiences, we found it really helpful to first engage teachers as a learner in these performance tasks. Because right away they'll see oh experience it. Yes. Oh, I loved that I was able to collaborate because I wasn't really sure what to do. And my neighbor had this idea that we tried out. And so that important piece of collaboration and communication, giving students space to do that in the classroom, that comes through. The other thing is, oh, the engagement with the phenomena, not just spending some time to really think about the phenomena, right? And make sense of the context of the task is key, making that personal connection to that phenomena. And then the last thing, centering their thinking for the for the closing or the explain phase, perhaps. The, you know, if we're talking about 5B, perhaps that third phase of explaining, like centering their thinking rather than the teacher. Often when students struggle, I've done this a million times myself in the classroom, where I was uncomfortable with their uncertainty. So I'm like, well, let me show you. And so centering their thinking and being able to pause and say, perhaps, this is something let's think about tonight. We'll come back and we'll investigate this a little more tomorrow. That also gives me space as a teacher to think about how I'm going to facilitate this tomorrow. I think the engagement as learner first. Then I think they like having it modeled with their students because those often the idea is you don't understand my class, or I have, you know, English language learners, I have students with disabilities, et cetera. And so then taking it from their engaging as learners in the task to let's try it in your classroom. You're right. Let's see how your students do with this task. And often the aha is, oh, my students can do this. And they have a model then of how to move student thinking from engage into the explore into the explain, right? So those two pieces are very important. But then I think that that's where we get to the third piece is then where do we give them space to plan this collaboratively, once they have a visual model of what this can look like in the classroom and how it differs from perhaps what we've been doing with direct instruction.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

I will just say ditto to all of that. And I think that one of the big challenges is that our incentive structures still often many teachers are like, well, that was great, but don't I still need my students to like know the answer at the end of this? Yeah. And so, you know, I am, I am at least in part an assessment human. So I will forever say, like, I think one of the things that we do have to have to help communicate is that actually the point of the learning is the thinking. And it's thinking with these increasingly sophisticated ideas and practices. But that's actually what success looks like. It's not the right answer necessarily, it's the thinking with these increasingly sophisticated ideas.

SPEAKER_02 20:47

That's what will transfer to the state tests. If you can adequately think about what you're being asked, that's the question I get all the time. Okay, but yeah, I still have to have my kids pass this biology exam. We call them keystones. You call them cast time. My kids still have to pass this biology, but I'm over here doing these super fun tasks. But to your point, if we're teaching them how to think, not how to regurgitate, the assessment will kind of take care of itself, kind of.

SPEAKER_03 21:14

Hopefully. When the entry point are the science and engineering practices, because by doing a performance task, you're looking at real-time thinking, real-time performance, right? And so when you enter through the SCPs, that helps you make sense of the core ideas. I could be up there with the Shishhmaref task or the interaction diverse systems task, and I could be modeling it for the students on the board and telling them what that is. But when they put that thinking together through the SCPs, through engaging with modeling, that sticks with students, right? Understand systems. Yes. Yeah. And then, you know, connecting that across concepts, then you're you're also we're really getting to three dimensional learning then with performance tasks.

Andrew 21:56

What's interesting is you mentioned systems. We have the opportunity. To podcast with individuals all across the nation, talking about NGSS and numerous benefits that come with it. But the one theme that always comes up is the struggle that every single educator has, which is time.

SPEAKER_02 22:13

Yeah.

Andrew 22:13

What am I doing with my time? So that's where I see the biggest paradigm shift coming, thinking about time differently. Because if we're honest, even societally speaking, we've all been taught that the best efficiency is a straight line. We go from here to there. And in a lot of ways, using that analogy, that's how we learn to teach. We're going to be as efficient as possible because there's so much, so much that you can learn. Really, as I see it, the shift is taking the road less traveled. How do we know we don't know what's out there? We don't know what this is, this might take even more time than I thought it might. And that's really where the art and the craft of being this educational professional comes into play because you're like, how am I going to adjust? What are we going to how are we going to navigate through this? So that's a big paradigm shift that I hear through everything you've said that you're able to support educators in that work, right? We we know it's going to take more time. Well, what does that look like? And how are we efficient with that time? Not as in going from A to B, but making the most use of a learning opportunity for the students so that they come out of it more enriched.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Yeah, I think that's so right and so important. And I think a big part of that is changing our thinking about what's the point of doing this. I think if the point of doing something is to gather as many facts as you could possibly gather and regurgitate them on the assessment, then yeah, the most straightforward, the most efficient way of spending your time is to just like shove in as much as you can into a given class period, a week, a month, a year, a grade band of instruction. I think if we think that the point of teaching and learning, the point of science education is to become an increasingly sophisticated thinker in the world. We're thinking about a different type of thinking that we want to be able to transfer to generalize to other contexts and developing knowledge that is generalizable, that can be, you can transfer in confident ways and know what applies here and what doesn't apply here, and like which of the tools in my toolkit do I use here? That just develops differently. And so to your point, the efficiency idea is a really important one. But like I think the question we have to be asking ourselves constantly is like, well, efficient to what end? Like purpose to what end? What are we actually trying to cultivate? And what's the most efficient path to doing that? Generalizable, transferable understanding. One of the most efficient paths to doing that is centering practices and cross-cutting concepts as like the way that you understand how to engage with a new context or how to just engage with an old context in a new way. It is much more efficient way to do that than to have to have knowledge of every single science idea and like roll through them to figure out which one is apply is applicable here. We'll also never get there. That is like actually impossible. None of us have equal access to every single science idea in our heads. But practices and cross-cutting concepts are the our ways of thinking. And those are something that we can efficiently cultivate to actually lead to higher order thinking and problem solving.

SPEAKER_03 25:23

What we also see in practice in LA County is that once teachers really value this type of learning, and teachers, trust me, I'm all about efficiency in the classroom. And I was like, no, we got to go to art at this time. So we've got to be done by this time, right? And the classroom revolves around the calendar and around the clock. I have full confidence in teachers because they want to do what's best with their students. They're always worried and thinking about their students.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

Oh, 100%.

SPEAKER_03 25:52

And so when they see their students engage at a different level and enjoy science at a different level, they come up with some really amazing ideas of how to fit this into their schedule. And one that I uplift all the time, which came from a fifth grade teacher, was like, well, I'm not going to do the full 60-minute task in one day of science. In fact, I'm going to engage them on Wednesday. I'm going to do the explore. We're going to revisit what we did on Wednesday. We're going to engage in the explore phase or the collaborative group work on Thursday. And then Friday, we'll look at each other's models and we'll make connections. And so that came from a classroom teacher who was like, this is valuable for me and for my students. And so how do I fit this into my schedule in a way that's authentic and really centers student reasoning and sense making and isn't about me like worrying about okay, I got to cut this off because we got to go. So, and that that kind of genius comes from our teachers, right? When they value this work.

Andrew 26:42

We started podcasting because we saw a need. There were great conversations that were happening, but not everybody was exposed to them. Truly, I think the mission through our podcasting was we wanted to be able to help support educators for them to feel unified in this effort and then also be empowered. And that's exactly what I'm hearing from the work of Atlas is that here it is, it's free, right? The podcasts are free. Here you go. Have a listen. Same kind of work. Like this is available for everyone. We just want to be a support for you as you're doing this work, for you to feel empowered, but also a spot where you can feel that unification. So again, a heartfelt thank you and gratitude for supporting us in that work. Clearly, you're so driven on this mission that you're willing to support others in that exact same work, and that you have such a passion and drive for this work in science and in education with educators that you're willing to support others.

SPEAKER_02 27:37

So for hours. We could talk to you for hours.

Andrew 27:40

Thank you for coming on NSCA voices and sharing this with the nation.

SPEAKER_03 27:44

Yeah. Thank you for giving us the opportunity. We're really excited about what's happening in California.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

Yeah, it's been so fun. Thank you. And if anyone wants to check out the tasks, there are over 1,350 of them across K-12, every domain, every practice, every cross cutting concept, a million different formats gathered from brilliant people all over the country. You can go to ngss atlas.com and you don't need to do anything other than type in what you're looking for, and tasks will pop up and you can go from there.

SPEAKER_02 28:16

That's amazing.