Self assessment resources

Task: Students decide what sort of animals two skulls belong to. A self-assessment checklist is included. Assessment focus: using evidence to identify carnivores and herbivores.

Task: Identify adaptations of 3 animals that live under the soil, and design an animal that could live underground. Self-assess the design by considering given criteria. Assessment focus: adaptations that enable an animal to live underground.

Students use their knowledge of the fire triangle to identify risk factors for a given scenario, and apply this to their own situation. They use rubrics to rate and improve some of their explanations.

Task: Using statements from four people decide and justify whether or not each person supports wind farms. Identify which person has a misconception about wind farms, giving a reason. Assessment focus: identifying different perspectives.

Task: Identify the variables for testing how fresh water and salt water affect rusting. Assessment focus: planning a fair test.

Task: Match everyday terms about properties with their meanings. Use their understanding about properties of paper and their uses to justify appropriate questions to investigate. Assessment focus: asking questions about paper properties.

Task: Create, use and identify ‘rules’ based on observable and/or measurable physical properties of common plastics. Assessment focus: classifying & identifying.

Task: Predict which of three balls dropped from different heights will squash most, explain why, and design an investigation to test prediction. Assessment focus: acceleration and fair testing.

Task: Answer questions about what happens to water in open and closed containers. Assessment focus: evaporation.

Task: describe how different features of a racing car help it go fast. Assessment focus: technological responses to forces.

Students answer a multi choice question and draw and explain their understandings about heat convection in a hot water cylinder. Assessment focus: Using science ideas to explain heat convection.

Task: Complete a diagram of part of the water cycle and answer a question about rain. Assessment focus: Question a) – the water cycle and conventions of diagrams; question b) – evaporation of a solution.

This practical task requires students to use methods of separation to separate a mixture of salt, sand, and iron filings. Students explain how they did this and the property of the substance that they used.

Task: Answer questions about what happens to water in open and closed containers and compare to the water cycle. Assessment focus: evaporation, the water cycle.

Task: Match the parts of a water cycle to the parts represented in a model of the water cycle and compare how they are the same and different. Assessment focus: interpreting a model.

Task: Students play a card game to construct a waterways relationships web. Assessment focus: relationships within a waterways ecosystem.

Students conduct a statistical investigation into the sentence length of different types of books by making and comparing dot plots.