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- The Centre for Science Education
- The Association for Science Education
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Plan, Teach and Asses
- Main page
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- APP and assessment for learning
- How science works
- Plan, teach and assess
- Course overview
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- Two year Key Stage 3
- What makes upd8 wikid tick
- Wikid Works
Not sure what it's like to teach an upd8 wikid lesson? This page will help you visualise it. You can download sample planning and assessment material, and watch the 'teaching presentation'.
The activity is called 'What was the crime?' and comes from the Forensics unit.
The story is: Billie (representing the students) and Dragon (their partner) are solving a crime committed in an art gallery. In this activity they take fingerprints from the picture frame.
The science ('Big Idea') is: students learn about particles and changes in state - to explain how iodine shows up hidden fingerprints.
Plan
For long term planning, there are teachers’ guides to the whole unit (about 6 week’s work), and each teaching sequence (1 week or a little more)
For lesson planning there is a full guide with each activity, with clear objectives, a step-by-step commentary and lesson timings.
Download sample activity guide
Teach
Each activity contains tasks for the student and input from the teacher. To make it easy to run the lesson, we supply a ‘presentation’ file which acts as the backbone for all the tasks and inputs. However, these are designed to be ‘active’ lessons, not ‘PowerPoint presentations’. Activities also come with student sheets.
Watch this sample presentation
Notice how the activity is built around a 'learning cycle' (for more details, see the upd8 wikid brochure).
Assess
There are formative assessment and homework tasks with performance descriptors that relate to National Curriculum levels. The learning cycle also provides built-in formative assessment. 'Elicit' tasks (at the beginning) probe what students already know. 'Evaluate' tasks (at the end) check students' understanding of new ideas.
More details about APP and formative assessment
Sample formative assessment task
Download Fake crime level assessed task.doc
There are several kinds of summative assessment for the end of the unit.
- Short quiz
- Problems to solve
- A challenging performance task, to test understanding in context
The range of assessment types is designed to give teachers evidence that students have mastered all the Big Ideas in the unit.
Sample performance task
Download sample performance task – teacher
Download sample performance task – student