Young computer scientists create a visual artifact that represents their research into a computing innovation in the world of cybersecurity. They then work individually to write an essay on the impact of technology on cybersecurity.

Watch as your pupils' hearts get pumping! An interactive activity has individuals record their heart rates after completing different activities. Each task has a different degree of physical activity. They then graph their results and...

Get the code right. A detailed resource provides pupils and teachers of computer science courses with released items from the 2008 exam. Questions range from studying code in a case study to creating code to perform specific tasks....

Who knew running a greenhouse required so much math? Amaze future mathematicians and farmers with the amount of unit conversions, ratio and proportional reasoning, and geometric applications involved by having them complete the...

The last installment of a 21-part unit is a practice performance task that asks class members to design an app using skills from the unit. Scholars take one of the previous apps from the unit and modify it by adding elements and making...

Use a performance task to assess third graders' ability to read informational text. After they plan a lemonade stand business, young entrepreneurs implement that plan through informational writing. The task assumes learners can...

Scientists rely heavily on data to make predictions and find solutions. Young scholars become scientists as they analyze information presented to them to construct responses. They consider scenarios related to air pollution, invasive...

Mother Nature may have less control of temperature than you think! Young scholars consider the effect urban environments have on local and surrounding temperatures as they respond to one of four free-response assessment questions from...

What an impressive task it is to make dental impressions! Pupils learn how dentists use proportional reasoning, unit conversions, and systems of equations to estimate the materials needed to make stone models of dental impressions....

Leave it to science to get scholars out of a jam. Young scientists use what they've learned about electricity and magnetism in the previous eight lessons in the series to build tools that will allow them to find their way out of the...

Are American young people prepared to become tomorrow's leaders in technological innovation, or does an obsession with being cool sidetrack essential skills? That is the question freshmen and sophomores must address in a performance...

How do you assess whether pupils have mastered certain concepts and skills? Designing a performance task that asks learners to demonstrate their skills and providing writers with a rubric that identifies these skills and provides...

This isn't rocket science, you know. A performance task has learners use right triangle trigonometry to calculate distances from stations on Earth to a satellite. It also requires finding the distance between two stations along the...

Don't run from the resource—sprint to it. Using an engaging performance task, scholars consider a set of constraints on the creation of a track. Given several possible designs, they determine if the designs meet the constraints. If not,...

The class gets their mean and median all in a row with an assessment task that uses a population of ducklings to work with data displays and measures of central tendency. Pupils create a frequency chart and calculate the mean and median....

The body is one big life-sized puzzle! A hands-on lesson builds on the idea and has individuals create life-size models of the body including all important organs of the digestive, circulatory, and respiratory systems. After building...

Scholars read excerpts from the story, Heidi, in a three-part assessment that focuses on comparing and contrasting characters. Each part contains three tasks that challenge learners to discuss, answer comprehension...

A three-part assessment challenges scholars to read informational texts in order to complete three tasks. Following a brief reading, class members take part in grand conversations, complete charts, and work in small groups to research...

Bridge the gap between mathematics and Career Technical Education. Pupils research the cost associated with building storage sheds and analyze possible profit. They build scale models and determine if building and selling the sheds is a...

Should the work of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences be funded by the government? Middle schoolers weigh in on the status of federal funding for programs that protect the environment with three text passages...

Create lists within lists. The second lab in a series of five in the unit has pupils develop a simple contact list app. The tasks within the lab build the need for an abstract data type. Individuals build more complexity into their...

As an assessment of their skill in crafting a compare and contrast essay, class members read and compare the portrayals of nature in excerpts from naturalist John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra and from poet Emily Dickinson's...

Looking for a performance assessment that asks individuals to demonstrate their competency in writing about informational text? Use Frederick Douglass' essay "On the Dred Scott Decision," and an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's 1857 speech...

Keep your pets slim, trim, and healthy using mathematics! Pupils use a linear programming model to optimize the amount and type of food to provide to a pet rabbit. They model constraints by graphing inequalities and use them to analyze a...