Learn how to plan, develop, and manage student-centered assessment strategies that can benefit your teaching and your students’ learning. This resource includes a Moodle 3.1 course backup (.MBZ file) that you can restore to your own Moodle instance. Note: If you are using Canvas, use the .MBZ (Moodle) version of the course. Download of Moodle or Common Cartridge will begin once you click on this resource.

Lisa Krohn, Director of Teaching and Learning, challenged teachers at Johnson Creek Elementary School to rethink the traditional format of student learning and assessment and, focus on how to create  successful learners. Students are now grouped by academic readiness instead of age. Teachers transitioned from being grade level teachers (e.g. 3rd grade teacher) to “Focus Area Advisors” specializing in math or literacy. The workshop model allows students to be active learners engaging in formative assessment practices including conferring, journaling, and computer adaptive programs to name a few.Read more about these practices wuthin the module.

 Throughout Wisconsin, districts and schools are pioneering promising practices in student assessment, moving from the theory of a strategic assessment system to a viable system that ensures students will graduate college and career ready.  Examples of these promising practices are being shared in WISELearn (a part of the Wisconsin Information System for Education (WISE). They reflect only a glimpse of what Strategic Assessment Systems look like in schools and districts across Wisconsin. 

Featuring an interview with Tom Baugnet, 2013 NEWMA AllStar from Georgia Pacific. (3:22 minutes)

In the 1870’s, the United States Government began a system of education for Native Americans in the U.S. Richard Pratt, a military veteran of the Civil War, was chosen to lead a school intended to assimilate Native American children into white American culture. Students there would be forced to cut their hair, speak the English language, change their names to Christian names, and change from their traditional religious beliefs to Christianity. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, PA in 1873. The boarding schools would have a profoundly negative impact upon generations of Native Americans and forced many to lose contact with their traditional culture. Several boarding schools were operated in Wisconsin, including one in Lac du Flambeau, WI.

Students design and develop a useful assistive device for people challenged by fine motor skill development who cannot grasp and control objects. In the process of designing prototype devices, they learn about the engineering design process and how to use it to solve problems. After an introduction about the effects of disabilities and the importance of hand and finger dexterity, student pairs research, brainstorm, plan, budget, compare, select, prototype, test, evaluate and modify their design ideas to create devices that enable a student to hold and use a small paintbrush or crayon. The design challenge includes clearly identified criteria and constraints, to which teams rate their competing design solutions. Prototype testing includes independent evaluations by three classmates, after which students redesign to make improvements. To conclude, teams make one-slide presentations to the class to recap their design projects. This activity incorporates a 3D modeling and 3D printing component as students generate prototypes of their designs. However, if no 3D printer is available, the project can be modified to use traditional and/or simpler fabrication processes and basic materials.

Through this earth science curricular unit, student teams are presented with the scenario that an asteroid will impact the Earth. In response, their challenge is to design the location and size of underground caverns to shelter the people from an uninhabitable Earth for one year. Driven by this adventure scenario, student teams 1) explore general and geological maps of their fictional state called Alabraska, 2) determine the area of their classroom to help determine the necessary cavern size, 3) learn about map scales, 4) test rocks, 5) identify important and not-so-important rock properties for underground caverns, and 6) choose a final location and size.

In this lesson, students learn some basic facts about asteroids in our solar system. The main focus is on the size of asteroids and how that relates to the potential danger of an asteroid colliding with the Earth. Students are briefly introduced to the destruction that would ensue should a large asteroid hit, as it did 65 million years ago.

In this hands-on engineering activity, students will build a tabletop wind turbine. Students get acquainted with the basics of wind energy and power production by fabricating and testing various blade designs for table-top windmills constructed from one-inch PVC pipe and balsa wood (or recycled materials). The activity includes lots of good media and Web resources supporting the science content.

Astrobiology Survey is an introductory course on astrobiology. It takes a multi-disciplinary approach that unites the sciences and arts to study the three questions of "How does life begin and evolve?", "Does life exist elsewhere in the universe?" and "What is the future of life on Earth and beyond?"

" This course covers the fundamentals of astrodynamics, focusing on the two-body orbital initial-value and boundary-value problems with applications to space vehicle navigation and guidance for lunar and planetary missions, including both powered flight and midcourse maneuvers. Other topics include celestial mechanics, Kepler's problem, Lambert's problem, orbit determination, multi-body methods, mission planning, and recursive algorithms for space navigation. Selected applications from the Apollo, Space Shuttle, and Mars exploration programs are also discussed."

Join Danny Rubin, founder of Rubin, and Eric Ingram, CEO of Scout, for an in-depth look at the future of space travel and issues of accessibility. This conversation covers inclusiveness, technology, space and more! Students and teachers should also make use of the webinar worksheet at https://rubineducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Rubin-Live-Webinar-Certificate-Explore-the-World-of-Space-Travel-January-12-2022.pdf

In this audio resource from NOVA, astronaut Gene Cernan recounts his harrowing experience during America's first attempt to do work in outer space.

With Michael Turner (far right), head of NSF's Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, as moderator, members of the research team (from right to left, Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Eugenio Rivera of the Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz, and theoretical astronomer Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center) presented their findings during a press conference on Monday, June 13, 2005, at NSF in Arlington, Va.

Intended for all audiences, this textbook is an introduction to the nature of the universe. Use it to research or review our solar system, stars, galaxies, and the history of the universe. Each chapter has a set of corresponding homework questions.

Galactic dynamics: potential theory, orbits, collisionless Boltzmann equation, etc. Galaxy interactions. Groups and clusters; dark matter. Intergalactic medium; x-ray clusters. Active galactic nuclei: unified models, black hole accretion, radio and optical jets, etc. Homogeneity and isotropy, redshift, galaxy distance ladder. Newtonian cosmology. Roberston-Walker models and cosmography. Early universe, primordial nucleosynthesis, recombination. Cosmic microwave background radiation. Large-scale structure, galaxy formation.

Size and time scales. Historical astronomy. Astronomical instrumentation. Stars: spectra and classification. Stellar structure equations and survey of stellar evolution. Stellar oscillations. Degenerate and collapsed stars; radio pulsars. Interacting binary systems; accretion disks, x-ray sources. Gravitational lenses; dark matter. Interstellar medium: HII regions, supernova remnants, molecular clouds, dust; radiative transfer; Jeans' mass; star formation. High-energy astrophysics: Compton scattering, bremsstrahlung, synchrotron radiation, cosmic rays. Galactic stellar distributions and populations; Oort constants; Oort limit; and globular clusters.

In this activity, students learn which characteristics make a species more likely to be “at-risk” of extinction, then practice analyzing the traits of at-risk animals.

This is a PDF (filesize 150 MB) of a text that teaches students Arabic with reading the Qur'an as the eventual goal. The text is geared for students from a South Asian background who want to study Arabic in English. It compares Arabic sounds to sounds familiar to a South Asian audience. There are audio files that accompany the lessons embedded in the online text. There are 64 lessons in 111 pages, complete with exercises. Selected readings are mostly from the Qur'an.

This Wide Angle video segment illustrates Islamic and secular elements of life in Turkey, and introduces Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first president of Turkey, and his reforms.