Thursday, October 20, 2016

NGSS Evidence Statements

Presented at the Fall 2016 NCNAAPT meeting and conference at UC Berkeley 
October 22nd, 2016

From the NGSS website: "NGSS Evidence Statements provide educators with additional detail on what students should know and be able to do. These are statements of observable and measureable components that, if met, will satisfy NGSS performance expectations."
Within the "Introduction and Overview" document:
"The evidence statements, as described here, describe what teachers or assessors would observe (not infer) from successful student performance of each performance expectation (PE). The evidence statements can serve as supporting materials for the design of curriculum and assessments. In the NGSS, each PE is accompanied by a foundation box with associated practice, core idea, and crosscutting concept. The evidence statements expand this initial structure to include specific, observable components of student performance that would demonstrate integrated proficiency by using all of the necessary tenets of the practice to demonstrate understanding of the disciplinary core ideas (DCIs) through the lens of the crosscutting concepts (CCC)."
"...the evidence statements are written to provide more clarity about what the PEs ask students to demonstrate, these statements are not sufficient to replace lesson plans or assessment items; asking students to simply perform the PEs verbatim would not be useful for instruction or assessment."

Blog of Phyz post on Evidence Statements

Presentation shared as Google Slides file  or as a pdf
Presentation handout as a Google Doc file or pdf

Workshop survey (tinyurl.com/NGSSevidence) for sharing brainstorming sessions

NGSS Evidence Statements website


Thursday, July 7, 2016

Crash Cushions - AAPT Summer Meeting 2016


Designing and Testing Crash Barriers, an Engaging NGSS Activity [AJ03]

Mon 07/18, 9:30AM - 9:40AM

Dan Burns, Los Gatos High School
Bree  Barnett Dreyfuss, Amador Valley High School

The design of highway crash barriers is rich in physics and the potential to engage students. Crash barriers are ubiquitous in urban, suburban, and rural areas. There are many different types in use. Designing them is an effective way to address NGSS standard HS-PS2-3 that asks students to apply scientific and engineering ideas to design a device that minimizes the force on an object during a collision. Crash barriers involve many physics topics like Newton’s laws, impulse and momentum, energy, and kinematics. The lab requires only one set of equipment but no eggs! Students design and build crash barriers from inexpensive materials and test them using a cart, track, and accelerometer. They can use their test results to improve their design. We will show several variations of crash barrier test setups using a variety of vendor equipment. We will show student examples and test data. 

 Powerpoint from our presentation available here.


Note:  We may refer to these student-made devices as "Crash Cushions" or "Crash Barriers."

Below are resources available from our first attempts at this project, materials we like to share, etc. 

  • Video summarizing Bree's 2016 classes showing their crash test and resulting graphs:
  • Video of professional crash cushion tests Dan likes to share: