Dhagat 1

Sandeep Dhagat
Professor Suk
EDUC 230-01 Education Field Experience
Fall 2017
Rationale Statement Standard #6

Standard Six: Assessment

The teacher understands and uses multiple methods of assessment to engage learners in their own
growth, to monitor learner progress, and to guide the teachers and learners decision making. (NJ
Professional Standards for Teachers, 2014, p. 8).

Artifact: Lesson Plan & Assessment

Date of Completion: December 8th, 2017 (Fall 2017)
Course Completed in: EDUC-230 Education Field Experience

Rationale Statement:
The following artifact represents the formal design of a grade- and standard-specific lesson plan
accompanied by an assessment tool that ties directly to the learning objectives. My lesson plan has
students design and conduct an experiment determining how an isopods movement behavior is
dependent upon environmental stimuli, which relates to how behaviors are adapted to environmental
conditions through natural selection. The assessment method I selected to assess the student learning
objectives was a formal lab report, which is both developmentally appropriate and ties directly to the
lesson format. The purpose of the artifact is to demonstrate how a professional teacher designs
assessments that match learning objectives with assessment methods and minimizes sources of
bias that can distort assessment results. (NJ Professional Standards for Teachers 6.i.2, 2014, p. 8).
Since students were engaging in the scientific method through experimentation as part of the lesson
activity, I wanted to design an assessment method that would have the greatest transferability and
realistic application. A formal lab report allows students to turn the thinking (conscious and
unconscious) they used to design and conduct the experiment into a coherent organization of written
statements. It also forces students to actively consider all parts of the scientific method when
considering how experiments translate to learned knowledge. Lastly, an assessment method that uses a
rubric helps to mitigate subjective biases from the teacher by clearly specifying what students must do
to earn a certain score. This reduces the guessing game aspects of doing an assignment, which may
affect the score distribution of a class and distort determinations about which students have met the
lesson objectives.
The inspiration for this lesson plan was, in fact, my 9th grade biology class. This specific
experiment was the only time my teacher used a lab to teach an entire content section and where there
was no lecture component. I recall students being more engaged with the activity because they realized
the lab was not some throwaway assignment put into the curriculum because we had extra time. The
lab actually had a valuable purpose, both for the teacher and us. However, one aspect I did change was
allowing students to choose the environmental stimuli they selected rather than using a predetermined
one. This was a crucial change in my opinion because it enhances freedom of choice, asks students to
create their own procedures for implementation (rather than mechanically following a set created by
 Dhagat 2

the teacher), and allows the class to learn more (if groups pick among several different variables).
Furthermore, it occurred to me that when teachers narrow the variables used in experiments they tend
to pick ones that will have the most noticeable differences from a control group. This is poor practice
because it gives future scientists the wrong impression that every result must be positive. Sometimes
the fact that nothing happened or changed is an important discovery to consider. Lastly, the reason I
created the rubric to assess the lab report was because on previous occasions in my own science classes
I have had teachers give vague requirements for lab reports. Oftentimes the best-performing students
were ones who could read the teachers preferences for formatting requirements and content depth
requirements. This turns student work into a guessing game that does not help students meet lesson
objectives.
In a future classroom, I would implement this lab with my own students if I was teaching a life
science course at the high school level. This lab has good applications to evolutionary theory, including
natural selection and adaptation. In addition, it is simplistic enough to implement in a single lab,
requires few materials that are hard to access, has students work collaboratively, and can be performed
with several other model organisms. The advantage this experiment has over a similar lab dealing with
plant movement (tropism) is students do not have to wait multiple weeks to find patterns.

Reference

Professional Development in New Jersey. (2014, August 4). Retrieved from New Jersey State Department
of Education:
http://www.state.nj.us/education/profdev/profstand/teacherstandardscrosswalk.pdf