Welcome!

For the 2019-2020 school year the Physical Science teachers are switching to standards-referenced grading. Our goal is to increase clarity when communicating what students actually know or can do.

Class Overview

Physical science is taken by all 9th graders in our district, it is the beginning of the end for our students science education. Because of this, we emphasize using, evaluating, and creating models to explain phenomena instead of focusing on science facts. Our goal is to help students develop into independent thinkers capible of answering the questions that cannot be readily answered by Google.

There are 8 units we are going to cover this semester, descriptions of what is covered in each unit can be found by either clicking on the menu button at the top if there is no sidebar on the left, or by clicking through the sidebar if it is there. Note, the website is still being built out so the topics are all there, but the supporting material is not all there yet. We are building it out as this year goes on.

Standards

A standard is a level of knowledge or demonstration of skill that your student shows. Rather than work towards and accumulate points, it is the demonstration of a skill or idea that earns a grade.

To emphasize this difference we are shifting from a percentage based system to a numerical scale; 1, 2, 3, and 4.

A 1 means that the student is just developing the concepts. A 2 means that the student possesses the foundational knowledge required. A 3 means that students have reached the expected level of understanding. A 4 means that the student has reached an advanced level of understanding.

In general:

• 1 is about a D
• 2 is about a C
• 3 is about a B
• 4 is about an A

For your students transcript, we will convert their grades to a typical letter grade.

Assessments

Throughout each unit we will be providing activities for students to work on. These are all practice helping prepare students for their final assessment for that particular unit. None of these activities will be graded. Answer keys will often be provided so that students can reflect on their work. Not doing the activities will make it much harder to well on the assessment.

Each unit has its own assessment. Often the assessments are written projects, or simply projects, that have associated rubrics outlining what is expected of each level. Students have the opportunity to revise these projects for a higher grade AFTER, they have demonstrated to us how they have worked on filling in their deficiencies.