Understanding Task Features
Every science performance task makes different trade-offs in terms of what features to highlight or foreground. These features may make some tasks more useful to you than others, depending on when, how, and for what purpose you are using them. The attributes and highlights shown in ATLAS were chosen based on teachers’ insights into what features were most important to them when deciding which tasks to use.
Task Features
Accessibility
Agency
Communication
Metacognition
How are attributes and tags evaluated and assigned?
All tasks were independently evaluated for attributes and highlights by a combination of science performance assessment experts and practicing science teachers. Each task attribute and highlight includes a set of look-fors, or indicators, drawn from research and practical implementation. Reviewers considered if each task met each indicator. For attributes, indicators are combined to produce a “low-medium-high” rating for every task. For highlights, reviewers tagged the tasks with the individual highlights that best reflect the particular strengths and features of a given task. Over time, ATLAS will continue to refine the attribute and highlight tags to ensure that they match teachers’ experiences using these tasks.
Is a task with more highlights or higher levels of attributes better than other tasks?
No. Highlights do not indicate task quality–they simply provide at-a-glance insights into characteristics of tasks that can help teachers decide if a given task is going to work well in their classroom.
How should I think about tags and attributes when I’m selecting a task?
Tags and attributes can help you figure out
- which tasks are going to match your current instruction and needs,
- which tasks might complement what current instruction looks like, and
- plan for how much time and modification might be needed to make a task work for you.
Over time, you can reflect on whether certain tags seem to consistently work better in your classroom, and what that might mean for current and future instructional goals you have.
Attributes
Every task includes indicators for four attributes:
Accessibility
To what degree do tasks...
- have student-facing materials that meet standards for digital and document accessibility?
- require reading loads within tasks appropriate for a wide range of students, given the purpose of the task?
- exhibit key features of Universal Design for Learning and Assessment?
Agency
To what degree do tasks...
- provide students with opportunities to make developmentally appropriate, active, and consequential choices and decisions within the performance task?
- engage students in cycles of goal-setting, purposeful action, and reflection on meeting those goals?
- invite students to participate in directing their own learning and choices?
Communication
To what degree do tasks...
- invite students to carefully interpret and communicate information through a range of modalities and formats?
- require students to consider audience and perspective when conveying ideas?
- provide opportunities for students to update their thinking and respond to ideas shared by others?
Metacognition
To what degree do tasks...
- explicitly invite students to reflect on and connect current experiences with prior and future learning opportunities?
- give students clear opportunities to consider how the performance task is building their understanding of science?
- invite students to reflect on ideas and practices they still need to develop to be successful?
Highlights
All ATLAS tasks were also independently evaluated for a set of tags that highlight specific features that are present in the task. There are 23 possible highlights. Tasks can include multiple highlights from each category.