December 1, 2025 | By Marta Mielicki, Nonye Alozie, Hui Yang, Arif Rachmatullah, and Anna Jennerjohn
What are we doing and why?
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) span K–12 and call for all students—including those in the earliest grades—to have meaningful opportunities to engage with science. This is an ambitious goal, particularly because teachers in the earliest grades generally lack resources to support science instruction.
One notable resource missing for the younger grades is systematic formative assessments that are aligned with NGSS. Formative assessment can help teachers improve early science instruction, but it can be challenging to gauge what young students understand about science. Assessments often rely heavily on reading and writing skills, and language and literacy skills are still developing in first grade.
To address this challenge, the SALDEE research team is working with elementary science teachers in the development of a suite of formative assessment tasks designed to meet first graders where they are in their language and literacy development. These tasks are aligned with the three-dimensional first-grade NGSS performance expectations in Life Science, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science.
Partnering with teachers is essential for designing meaningful science assessments that work in real classrooms. Teachers’ day-to-day experiences, practical wisdom, and deep understanding of how young students learn can help researchers refine ideas and make assessment tasks more effective and usable.
Through our collaboration with teachers, we’ve gained valuable insights into classroom realities that result in a set of science formative assessment tasks that both align with the NGSS and support authentic student thinking and engagement. Below, we describe our process for developing the tasks and share three lessons learned about formative assessment design for early elementary students from this collaboration.
What is our process for developing assessment tasks?
First, our team deconstructed the first-grade NGSS standards, or performance expectations (PEs), to better align with instruction. For example, take the complex PE in Physical Science, 1-PS4-1: “Plan and conduct investigations to provide evidence that vibrating materials can make sound and that sound can make materials vibrate.” Students are expected engage in two distinct scientific practices: planning and investigating. Planning an investigation requires generating a hypothesis and designing an experiment to appropriately test it. Conducting an investigation involves using tools, making measurements, and executing a designed procedure. Students are also expected to provide evidence for two different physical phenomena—vibrating material makes sound, and sound makes materials vibrate.
Creating formative assessment tasks that would give teachers insight into students’ understanding of specific components of a given PE requires separating a complex PE like the one above into simpler learning performances (LPs). LPs are smaller and more manageable components for instruction and assessment that let students demonstrate their “knowledge-in-use” at key stages in their learning progression. Our team divided all of the first-grade PEs into LPs.
Next, we designed assessment tasks based on each LP. We created small-group tasks that can be administered to groups of 2–4 students to encourage students to show what they know through discussion and collaboration. We also created individual accountability tasks that can be administered to the whole class to provide insights into individual student understanding. We included a variety of ways that students can show what they know through the tasks, including speaking, drawing, writing, or circling multiple-choice response options. We also included different media such as videos, stories, pictures, and audio files in addition to verbal and written prompts.
Finally, and most importantly, we traveled to schools across the United States to learn more from teachers and students about how to make our tasks work in applied settings. In spring 2024, the SALDEE team administered the tasks to students in a small number of classrooms. Using what we learned, we revised the tasks. In spring 2025, we asked a group of teachers to administer the tasks to their students during regular instruction. We conducted classroom observations and teacher interviews and analyzed student data responses to further refine the tasks.
What have we learned from teachers and students?
Overall, the teachers who tried our tasks agreed that the content and vocabulary in the tasks were grade-appropriate. They also agreed that the tasks were well aligned with the three-dimensional learning of the NGSS. These teachers told us that they would use the tasks again and that their students were excited and engaged when completing the tasks. We also learned a few important lessons from teachers and students about how to make our tasks better.
Lesson 1: Teacher implementation of the small-group tasks varied depending on classroom routines and norms. Some teachers did not implement the small-group tasks as we originally planned because they could not pull a single group aside to complete a task. Instead, these teachers had students form groups and implemented the tasks with all of the students in a class at the same time. In our teacher guide revisions, we plan to provide teachers with a variety of options for ways to implement small-group tasks to best fit their classrooms.
Lesson 2: Some vocabulary may be novel depending on students’ lived experience. For example, we designed a task that used the word “basement” to get students thinking about how plant structures such as roots can be similar to building structures. When a teacher in Florida had students try this task, we realized that children in Florida have very little experience with basements, making this representation difficult to understand. With help from teachers like this one, we are updating the tasks to include additional explanations for terms that may be unfamiliar to students.
Lesson 3: In the small-group tasks, students needed additional support to share their thoughts with the group and plan what to write. We quickly learned that students need explicit structures in place for verbally expressing their ideas in groups. Additionally, teachers need support in guiding discussions with young children who are still developing their communication skills. We updated the tasks to include prompts asking students to think first before sharing with a partner. For tasks that include a written component, we also updated the teacher materials to include prompts that encourage students to say what they are thinking out loud before writing it down.
What’s next?
We are in the last phase of our NSF-supported grant, which involves field-testing. We spent this summer refining the tasks based on feedback from teachers and reviews from content experts. We are in the process of recruiting a new group of teachers to use the tasks in their classes during the 2025–26 school year. If you are (or know) a first- or second-grade teacher who may be interested in participating, please check out the links below to learn more about the study.
Collaboration with teachers is critical in design and development research. Those who participated in our studies so far provided valuable insights and helped us overcome our blind spots to ensure that the SALDEE assessment tasks work well in real classrooms. We are excited to be able to share our tasks with more teachers soon to support them in providing opportunities for young learners to engage in science.
To learn more about the SALDEE project, visit these resources: