In addition to the above changes in the experiment observation chart, three additional changes were made for science experiments. First, in order to more carefully assess students during experiments, I changed the format of the experiments from whole-class to small groups. While each small group (4-8 students) are working on the experiment, other students are working silently on their portfolio options and vocabulary building sheets. Groups rotate so that all students conduct the experiment some time during the 50 minute science period. Another modification I made was that the students remain in their seats for the experiments. At first, I had students coming to a table or an area to conduct experiments. This became crowded and troublesome as a student teacher and the bilingual teacher both needed the table to work with students. To remedy this, I created the "portable teacher" and put all tools and materials needed into a bin and physically came around to each team of students. This also prevented excessive movement in the room and helped maintain a quiet atmosphere. The students also loved the portable teacher idea! The last revision I made was in the chart itself. When I first tested the informal observation rubric, I found it difficult to assess every student in 6 categories. "Support hypothesis" was then combined with "logical prediction". This was a natural combination as students are always expected to support their predictions or opinions. I removed the "apply prior knowledge" component as once one student in the group did this, the rest of the group members could not fairly be assessed in their independent application of prior knowledge. I also concluded that it is virtually impossible, despite all of the revisions, to assess every student in every category during every experiment. My goal then, is to assess each student 2 times during a unit of study. This worked well in our Matter unit, as there were about 8 experiments. In addition, I modeled for students what a "3" in each category would look like. I physically repeated an experiment that students were familiar with and asked students to rate me based on what I expected for a 3. I found that students often were harder on me than I would have been on myself, which led me to asking them to self-evaluate and evaluate their group members for each experiment as described below.

At the end of the experiment, students wrote their name at the top of an index card. Next to their own name, they wrote the number of points they felt they deserved for the activity (out of 12). Underneath they wrote the names of their group members and how many points each group member deserved. The cards were collected and all numbers were recorded in the grade book. Example: