According to the middle school science TEKS, educators should be spending at least 40% of instructional time doing lab activities to help enrich the content. This emphasis has been evident on the new STAAR as the process skills have been integrated into multi-stage questions. The problem at hand is how to truly assess that the students are able to manipulate these process skills with the content. Is it fair to give a paper and pencil test for kinesthetic activities? Does the 3-D, kinesthetic relationship get lost on a traditional assessment? This session will show how to use a lab practical to assess mastery of process skills with core content while using the kinesthetic skills from a set of lab activities. We hope to show that the correlation of a kinesthetic activity may be translated into a 2-D mental model, like the STAAR, while ensuring students are benefiting from lab experiences.
