Task Portal

Visit our NGSA Task Portal

Our tasks can be viewed through the NGSA Task Portal. You are welcome to browse tasks without a login. However, if you are interested in using them with students in your school or district, we ask that you register for an account on the task portal page.

About Our Tasks

In the Framework and NGSS, it is not what you know, but how you use and apply what you know that demonstrates proficiency.
The knowledge-in-use perspective of the NGSS represents a different way of thinking about science learning in that disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts are intended to work together to enable students to reason with evidence, make sense of phenomena, and design solutions to problems. For each performance expectation in the NGSS, the three dimensions – disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts – are integrated into a single statement that represents what is to be assessed at the end of a grade level or grade band.

How can students’ progress toward meeting the performance expectations be assessed in the classroom?
To address the goal of formatively assessing students’ progress towards meeting the performance expectations during the course of instruction, we are developing tasks that correspond to learning performances that clearly describe the knowledge-in-use that students need to demonstrate in order to meet a performance expectation. A single learning performance is crafted as a knowledge-in-use statement that is smaller in scope and represents a key 3-dimensional aspect of a performance expectation. A related set of learning performances represent the progress toward achieving a given performance expectation.

About Our Online Task Portal

Our assessment tasks are delivered through an online system that is comprised of interactive assessment tasks to meet the needs of teachers and students in increasingly diverse science classrooms. Videos and simulations, for instance, are incorporated into some of the assessment tasks to create authentic and engaging scenarios and also reduce literacy demands; stamps and drawing tools are included to help students more easily express ideas and formulate responses; and scaffolds, such as prompts to support students in constructing explanations and building models, are intended to help students who are making early steps toward a set of performance expectations.

Using NGSA Tasks in the Classroom
Our tasks are intended to be used to support teaching and learning in classrooms that are striving for NGSS-aligned instruction. They include tasks that are ideal for checking in on student learning at various time points during instruction; some are designed for a mid-point check-in, whereas others are better suited for early formative assessment, and still others encompass more aspects of a performance expectation and thus are a better fit for near the end of instruction. Since we are in the midst of studying the full range of possible uses for our tasks in the classroom, teachers who use our tasks will need to consider the best “fit” for their students and classroom situations.