Inquiry Work Samples
What is a work sample?
State requirements
• "Teachers are expected to provide instruction and classroom assessment in all
four dimensions of the scoring guide. However, only the dimensions indicated
below must be reported for school district work sample management."
- 2003–2004 Collecting with a rating of 4 or higher in Collecting
dimension
- 2004–2005 Designing, Collecting with a rating of 4 or higher in both
dimensions on the same work sample
- 2005–2006 Designing, Collecting, Analyzing with a rating of 4 or
higher in each dimension. Designing and Collecting must
be done on the same work sample. Analyzing may be on a
separate sample.
What does an inquiry work sample look like?
• Work sample is essentially a lab report written by the student to show what he/she
did and what he/she learned from that experience.
• Lab work
- may be done in class as part of a team experiment
- may be based on experiment which is in a module
- should provide student or group of students an opportunity to develop and
investigate their own hypothesis or question
- should provide students an opportunity to modify or extend a procedure
they have already used, or to invent a new procedure
• Written report
- must be the student's individual work
- may be the result of one or more rewrites
• Lab reports at all levels, K–12, follow the same format
 Forming a question or hypothesis
 Provides background information to explain origin of
question/hypothesis
 Develops a question or hypothesis that can be tested
 Clearly communicates ideas
 Designing the investigation
 Describes a logical procedure
 Develops an experimental plan that addresses the
hypothesis/question
 Clearly communicates ideas
 Collecting and presenting data
 Records reasonable data
 Designs a data table
 Transforms original data into a more useful format (graph, chart,
percentages, etc)
 Analyzing and interpreting results
 Responds to question/hypothesis with some support from data
 Summarizes results accurately
How is a work sample evaluated?
Scoring guide
State
Student Language
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Inquiry Work Samples – Variables
Integrating work samples into the module
Swingers
• Focus on the collecting and displaying of data and the idea that only one variable is
being changed.
Part 1
A "T" chart showing team members and number of swings is a good way to
display this data
Part 2
Several T-charts could be used here:
• release position and number of swings
• mass and number of swings
• pendulum length and number of swings.
Transformation of the data into a graph is a crucial step in understanding the
relationship between pendulum length and number of swings.
Part 3:
Be sure that students can verbalize the relationship shown by the graph. Having
the students write the relationship on the graph is a good idea.
Extensions
Any of the suggested extensions provide students with an opportunity to explore
on their own. While these are the types of activities that would produce good
work samples, at this point it would be better to let the students try one of the
extensions and record data without doing a complete lab report.
Lifeboats
Part 1
Summarize the data collected by having each team make a T-chart showing the
name and mass of each of their boats.
Part 2
A data table and graph grid are provided.
Part 3
Using the graph to predict the outcome of new lifeboat tests is a crucial idea.
This would be a good place to have the class work together to develop a
paragraph conclusion for the lab in which the students summarize the results of
the experiment. What did they do? What did they find out?
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Extensions
Again, these activities are good examples of the kind of things that would lead to
good work samples. Have the students try one of the extensions and record their
data. They could also write a paragraph describing what they did and what they
found out.
Plane Sense
• In this activity the students get a little more freedom in selecting a variable to test.
Part 1
Part 2
Although the procedure doesn't specifically call for it, the students could construct
a T-chart and a graph. Depending on what variable the students have chosen to
test, they may find that the graph does not show any pattern—there might not be a
simple relationship between the variable the students have chosen and the length
of the plane's flight.
This also might be a place to talk about mean, median, mode, and range if the
students have been successful with these ideas in math. Repeating an experiment
three or more time is always a good idea if time allows—if you get similar results
on several runs, you have more confidence in your results. The students could
take the data from several identical runs and determine the median and range.
Part 3
The procedures given to the students lead them through the whole process—
picking a variable, designing the experiment, collecting data, and analyzing their
results. This is inquiry, albeit in a highly guided form. Working together to
develop a conclusion for the experiment would give the students another
opportunity to use the kind of thinking they will need to write their own
conclusion for the next activity.
Flippers
This activity ends with the students doing a complete guided experiment. Production of a
written laboratory report would be a natural extension of the activity. By the time the
students have completed the "Design an Experiment: Flippers" sheet, all they have left to
do is to analyze their results and write the report.
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