The National Academies Press book Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards develops an approach to science assessment to meet the vision of science education for the future as it has been elaborated in A Framework for K-12 Science Education (Framework) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). 
This five-step process, from STEM Teaching Tools, is designed to help teams develop three-dimensional assessment tasks. Three-dimensional assessment tasks allow you to make inferences about students’ integrated understanding of disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts.
The purpose of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Task Screener is 1) to determine whether classroom assessment tasks are high quality, designed to elicit evidence of three-dimensional performances, and designed to support the purpose for which they will be used, and 2) to provide a group of reviewers with a common set of features to ground conversations about what it “looks like” for students to demonstrate the kinds of performances expected by three-dimensional standards. 
The Achieve Task Annotation Project in Science (TAPS) was launched to provide an answer to the questions “what does it look like to ask students to demonstrate progress toward three-dimensional standards?” and “what are the most important features of high-quality science tasks?” This suite of resources includes annotated examples of assessment tasks for elementary, middle, and high school as well as a series of short resources that highlight the major takeaways across the whole project. 
Achieve’s new science Cognitive Complexity Framework offers a new approach to capturing and communicating the complexity of summative assessment items and tasks designed for three-dimensional standards. The complexity framework can be used to assess the degree to which an assessment task asks students to intellectually engage in and make use of disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and cross-cutting concepts in service of sense-making. The new framework allows for both the analysis of individual items or tasks and the holistic analysis of multi-component tasks or item clusters. 
The Stanford NGSS Assessment Project is focusing on ways that high-quality performance assessment can support the implementation process. The website includes research and reports, NGSS assessments, and support for educators, assessment developers, and PD providers. Dr. Jill Wertheim joined us for #ILSciCom to discuss the resources available. 
The Illinois Science Assessment is given to students enrolled in a public school district in grades 5, 8, and 11. The assessment will be administrated in an online format and is aligned to the Illinois Learning Standards for Science Incorporating the NGSS. Click here for more information.