Who Uses PALS?

PALS is a two-tiered on-line performance assessment resource library composed of performance assessment tasks for elementary, middle, and secondary levels. The first tier is for use by teachers and professional development organizations. The second tier is a password-protected, secure Accountability Pool of science performance assessments for use by state assessment programs and systemic reforms.

PALS uses technology to efficiently archive numerous assessments for ready browsing by teachers and goes beyond mere storage of assessments to support cross-links with standards, tasks, scoring criteria, and annotated student work. These resources can be shared by assessment programs, allowing them to have access to a large pool of performance assessments to use or to adapt for their testing administrations. Teachers can administer the tasks as part of their classroom assessments, adapt them or use them as models for developing their own investigations, and contribute their adaptations to the resource bank for other teachers to use.