Performance Tasks

How have animals made our lives easier? Think about how humans have solved some of our problems by using ideas from animals - like how they use their body parts to survive and grow. That is what we will be investigating in this unit.

This Instructionally-Embedded Assessment was designed...

Overarching Challenge: Can you make sure that the ecosystem in Biosphere 3 has what it needs to keep people alive? In this assessment, students are introduced to the plans that a group of researchers have created for an ecosystem to go in a new Biosphere, which is being designed to be able to...

Overarching Challenge: How can we conserve the amount of water that is used in California? In this assessment, students will participate in a role-play simulation of a City Council meeting for the town of California City. The Council is considering solutions for reducing water use. After...

How can we regulate (control) our fishing practices to maintain stable tuna populations and to catch enough fish to feed people around the world? Students work with a partner and use a computer simulation to investigate the effect of changing different variables on a tuna population. After...

What do sloths in the Amazon have to do with the growth of the Andes Mountains? In small groups students will use resources provided and what they know about the rock cycle to develop a model that shows interactions across the earth system that cause changes to the geology, climate, and ecology...

How can sound help us clean polluted water? In this task, students are introduced to a problem that affects many lakes and ponds they get polluted. A company claims they a new machine called a Sound Scrubber that can break the cells of the algae using just sounds, and one community has asked the...