This is a report written primarily for science teachers. It focuses on samples of questions and student responses taken from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science assessment that was administered in 1996 to students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Each student who participated in the assessment was required to do a hands-on task; and, slightly more than 60 percent of the questions were open-ended and thus required students to construct their own responses. The report is divided into four parts: The first part (chapter 1), provides an overview of the assessment; the second part (chapters 2, 3, and 4), presents examples of questions and students' responses; the third part (chapters 5 and 6) contains information collected from students, teachers, and school administrators about classroom practices, student motivation, and parental involvement in learning; finally, the fourth part contains appendices offering a fuller description of the procedures used for the NAEP 1996 science assessment (appendix A), scoring guides for questions discussed in chapters 2, 3, and 4 (appendix B), and standard errors for the statistics presented (appendix C).
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