Units 2 and 3 include multiple measurements such as plant growth and water use. Assessment tasks are authentic. Plant growth and water use is both authentic and relevant. An individual student s performance is similar on two or more tasks that claim to measure the same aspect of student involvement. The repeated measurements of plant height and water use take time, and allow for a relaxed setting for data analysis, and reflection on technique.
Students have adequate opportunity to demonstrate their achievements.
The time frame of plant growing experiments allows for drawings to be completed and a mathematical treatment of data to be understood. The lab notebooks can show the evolution of understanding for each student. Assessment tasks and methods of presenting them provide data that are sufficiently stable to lead to the same decisions if used at different times. Rates of plant germination and growth can vary over different times, often due to changed environmental conditions. However, the methods of germination and measurements are fundamentally the same and very stable.