​Dear Science Teaching Colleague:

We invite you to help us in Project CONSTRUCT (Crowd-Sourced Online Nexus for Developing​ ​Assessments of Middle-school Physical Science Disciplinary Core Ideas) an NSF-funded effort to​ ​improve middle school physical science assessment items. To do so,​ ​educators across the country have recently revised middle school questions to improve the quality of items that were determined to be too​ ​difficult or contained gender or racial/ethnicity bias.

We need your help! As part of our validation process, we​ ​administer question sets to students from a cross section of the nation’s schools. Student responses to these field test questions help us to improve the questions, and provide a​ ​snapshot of student understanding of physical science at this level. We need to test only about 30 questions per student in any one classroom once this year. You can help us by volunteering one class period during Spring 2023 near the end of your course (anytime in April, May or June), to administer a set of questions to your students. Completion of a test should take about 30 minutes.

We recognize the demands on your time. However, because the questions are based on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), we believe that the test experience will help your students to anticipate related questions on district or state proficiency tests. We will send you an answer key after you have returned the completed tests, which will help you to discuss the items and their content with your students.

Upon completion of the field test, we will also send you a report which will include a profile of your students’ performance relative to the physical science standards. In addition, we will credit you and your school as assisting in this nationwide assessment effort of middle school physical science education. Any test data appearing in any report or other publication will appear only in aggregated form without reference to any school by name and that students will always be anonymous to us on all tests.

As a special thank you to our teachers, we will provide a Harvard & Smithsonian Certificate of Appreciation for your efforts. If you are interested in participating, please use this link to complete a brief information card: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0T8mQoDoz9kILnWDO5QXV58kaFKONHD38s4H0mALTJ_8Q9A/viewform?usp=sf_link

In addition, please feel free to reach out to Annette Trenga, our test site coordinator at  atrenga@cfa.harvard.edu if you have any questions.

To learn more about our assessments, visit the MOSART website
https://waps.cfa.harvard.edu/mosart/index.php.

Sincerely,
Philip M. Sadler, Ed.D., Director
Science Education Department
F.W. Wright Senior Lecturer in Astronomy
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
60 Garden Street, MS 71
Cambridge, MA 02138