My Department Is Emphasizing Sensemaking This Year. How Do I Measure It?

A department chair sent me this in September, which is exactly when it tends to arrive. A school picks a focus, the focus is a good one, and then someone has to figure out how to put a number next to it by the end of the semester.

Before the measurement, a minute on the thing being measured, because sensemaking is one of those words that gets adopted much faster than it gets defined, and a department that has not defined it will end up with a rubric that quietly measures participation.

Start by Defining It

Sensemaking is the work students do to build and refine an explanation for how or why something happens, using the disciplinary ideas and practices of the field as their tools.

Two things follow from that. First, sensemaking is not a trait. It is not a disposition some students have and others lack, and it is not something you rate on a scale of one to four the way you might rate persistence. It is an activity. Second, it only exists in relation to a task where something needs figuring out. If the answer can be recalled, no sensemaking is happening and there is nothing to measure. This is the part departments skip, and it is why so many sensemaking rubrics end up floating free of any actual evidence.

With that settled, seven keys.

1. You cannot measure it with a task that has a recallable answer. If your assessment asks students to explain photosynthesis after a unit on photosynthesis, most of what you are measuring is recall of an explanation they were given. Give them something unfamiliar that the ideas they have learned can be used to explain. A sealed terrarium opened three times in 2,105 days. A metal added to an acid in a flask with a balloon on top. A rollercoaster that reaches 111 miles per hour in five seconds.

2. The measurement lives in the reason, not the answer. Ask students for an answer, then ask why they gave it. Choose the model, then explain why that model. Sort the descriptions, then explain why you sorted them that way. The answer alone tells you very little about whether reasoning occurred, because students can arrive at a correct answer by pattern matching, by elimination, or by remembering what the teacher said. The reason is your evidence.

3. Remove the barriers that make you measure writing instead. A student who understands the mechanism but cannot yet write it fluently in English looks, on paper, exactly like a student who is not making sense of anything. Let students draw. Let them record audio. Let them write in their home language or a mix. Let them use speech to text. Skip this and you have built a writing assessment with a science phenomenon on the cover, and you will systematically underestimate the students you can least afford to underestimate.

4. Match the analysis to the question you are actually asking. There are three questions here. If it is “what ideas are my students using,” sort responses by answer, subdivide by reason, and name each way of thinking. You get four to eight named ways of thinking and a count of how common each is. If it is “what does this student need to do differently,” do the same sorting, set aside the students who reached the target answer with acceptable reasoning, and name what is missing in each remaining group: “did not explain the mechanism,” “used data rather than evidence,” “treated a change of state as evidence of a new substance.” If it is “how proficient is this student,” score the full task on a performance worksheet and place each student in one of three categories: meets the expectation, close but needs minor improvement, or needs substantial support.

5. Notice that most departments want the first question and ask for the third. When a school says it wants to measure sensemaking, leadership usually needs a proficiency number and teachers usually need a description of the thinking in the room. Those are different products from different analyses. Say out loud in the department meeting which one you are building, because a system designed to produce one will not produce the other, and pretending otherwise is how good initiatives quietly turn into paperwork.

6. Do not build a rubric that scores talk. Group discussion is one of the best windows into sensemaking you will get, and you should be listening. But the moment that discussion carries a grade, the incentive shifts back toward producing the right answer and away from the tentative, exploratory talk sensemaking requires. Listen in on a few groups a day with a clear purpose, noting where ideas are progressing and where they are stuck. The Talk Resource Tool from STEM Teaching Tools is a ready-made protocol for this, with a reusable seating chart and an idea-progression roster, and it helps you keep track of the multilingual learners and students with disabilities you most want to hear from.

7. Measure growth with a consistent structure, not a repeated task. Give the identical task in September and May and a good chunk of what you measure is memory. Use different phenomena with the same structure, analyze them the same way, and compare. What you are looking for over a year is not a higher average. It is a change in the kind of reasoning showing up: more students explaining a mechanism rather than describing a correlation, fewer distinct alternative ideas surviving to the end of a unit, and more students naming a disciplinary idea in their reason without being prompted.

Putting It All Together

Measuring sensemaking is less about building an instrument than about changing what you collect. You need a task where something has to be figured out, a prompt that asks for reasoning and not just an answer, a way for every student to express that reasoning, and an analysis method chosen to fit the question you are asking.

Do that and you will have something better than a number. You will have a description of how the students in your room are thinking, which is the thing that lets you teach differently tomorrow. And if your department also needs a number, you can still get one. Just do not let the number be the only thing you collect, because it is the least useful part of what these tasks can tell you.

How ADI Makes This Easier

The hard part is the task itself. It has to be built around a phenomenon students have not seen, be explainable with the ideas they have been learning, pair an answer question with a reason question in every part, be short enough to fit in a period, and be accessible enough that you are measuring reasoning rather than reading and writing.

Phenomenon-Driven Tasks are designed and pilot tested against those requirements, and each comes with guidance for all three analyses so you can pick the one that matches your question rather than defaulting to a score.

Want to Take a Look?

Browse the Phenomenon-Driven Tasks books at shop.argumentdriveninquiry.com/collections/phenomenon-driven-tasks, or learn more about ADI curriculum materials, the ADI Learning Hub, and our professional learning options at argumentdriveninquiry.com.