The Science Unit That Assessed Language Instead of Learning
A seventh-grade science teacher has 22 English learners in a class of 28 students. Their English proficiency ranges from Level 1 to Level 4. The unit objective is for students to explain how energy moves through a food web. The teacher gives a pre-assessment with a diagram and five matching items. Only 4 of 22 ELs can label the diagram, 12 can match organisms to roles, and none can explain energy transfer in writing. During the unit, the teacher uses exit tickets with the sentence frame Energy moves from ___ to ___ because ___. Most students copy the frame without adding content. The summative test has 20 multiple-choice items with long distractors and five short-answer questions written at grade-level text complexity; there are no visuals or word banks. The teacher concludes that the ELs did not learn the science and plans to reteach the same material in the same way.
1. Critique the pre-assessment, formative checks, and summative test. Distinguish language demands from science-content demands.
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The assessments are not clean measures of science learning.
- Pre-assessment: The diagram and matching items are useful for checking recognition of roles, but they do not reveal whether students understand energy transfer. The writing item is a valid science task, but for Level 1 and 2 students it is also a high-level English production task. A low score may reflect language, not absence of ideas.
- Exit tickets: Copying the frame without content shows procedural compliance, not comprehension. The frame is a scaffold, but it has become the task. The teacher needs a check that requires students to select, draw, or say the relationship, not just fill blanks.
- Summative test: Long multiple-choice distractors and grade-level short answers add unnecessary reading and writing load. The test confuses science knowledge with academic English proficiency. It also lacks visual supports and does not separate content accuracy from language mechanics.
The teacher should build assessments that keep the science demand rigorous while reducing irrelevant language load. That may include labeled diagrams, sentence starters, oral explanations, and separate scores for content and language.
2. Design a coherent instructional sequence that uses the pre-assessment data and prepares students for the summative task. Include language objectives and scaffolds.
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The sequence should be backward-designed from the science standard and a language objective.
Content objective: Students will explain how energy moves from producers to consumers in a food web. Language objective: Students will use sequence and cause-effect language such as first, then, because, and energy moves from ___ to ___ to explain a food chain.
Sequence:
- Pre-teach vocabulary with visuals and cognates: producer, consumer, decomposer, energy, transfer. Students sort picture cards and match terms to examples.
- Build background with a short video and a hands-on food-web card activity. Students physically arrange organisms and trace arrows.
- Model explanation with a teacher think-aloud and a labeled diagram. The teacher shows a strong and weak explanation and asks students to identify what makes the strong one clear.
- Guided practice in pairs using sentence frames and a graphic organizer. Students explain one chain orally before writing.
- Formative check that requires content, not just frame completion: students draw arrows, label energy flow, and record a 30-second oral explanation. The teacher listens for the relationship, not perfect grammar.
- Writing transfer with a paragraph frame, word bank, and peer feedback focused first on science accuracy and then on one language feature.
This sequence uses the pre-assessment data, keeps content rigorous, and makes the language demands explicit.
3. The teacher says, “I will just reteach the same unit more slowly.” Explain why this is unlikely to work and what data the teacher should collect next.
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Reteaching the same way more slowly does not address the actual barrier. The students did not fail because they needed more time with the same text-heavy input; they failed because the input and assessment were not comprehensible and did not separate language from content.
More time with long distractors, grade-level short answers, and copied sentence frames would repeat the same mismatch. The teacher needs to change the task design, not only the pacing.
Next data to collect:
- Oral explanations with pictures: Can students say or point to the direction of energy even if their writing is limited?
- Diagram tasks: Can they draw arrows and label producers and consumers correctly?
- Vocabulary checks: Do they recognize terms receptively before being asked to produce them?
- Writing samples: Can they use because and sequence words to link two organisms?
- Error analysis: Are mistakes about science concepts, English vocabulary, sentence structure, or all three?
The teacher should use these data to adjust scaffolds and to report content learning separately from English language development. A valid reassessment might combine a labeled diagram, an oral explanation, and a short supported paragraph.