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The idea that formative assessments embedded in a curriculum could help guide teachers toward better instructional practices that lead to greater student learning has taken center stage in science assessment research. In order to embed formative assessments in a curriculum, curriculum developers and assessment specialists should collaborate to create these assessment tasks. This article describes the development of the formal embedded formative assessments and implementation plans for the collaborative research study. It describes the fundamental shift away from "summative assessment scripts" to formative assessments lesson scripts. Assessment tasks and implementation plans are described along with the rationale for why these tasks were selected and where these tasks were placed in the curriculum. Finally, we conclude about how to embed formative assessments in new or existing curricula and how to help teachers use these assessments successfully. We point out the critical importance of collaboration and professional development aimed at enabling teachers to re-conceptualize the role of assessments in their teaching, linking formative assessments to overall goals, and providing a learning trajectory as reference for teachers to locate students' ideas in the trajectory and provide feedback accordingly.

Our project to embed formative student assessments in the Foundational Approaches in Science Teaching curriculum required a close collaboration between curriculum developers at the Curriculum Research & Development Group (CRDG) and assessment developers at the Stanford Educational Assessment Laboratory (SEAL). This was a new endeavor for each organization, and throughout the project, many lessons were learned about embedding assessments and about the collaboration process. In this article, we discuss what we learned about the strengths and weaknesses of the collaboration up to the beginning of the randomized experiment. What we found comported with the literature on research collaborations. For example, past collaborations between CRDG and SEAL facilitated moving the project forward and sustained the collaboration. That said, the physical distance between the groups gave rise to some misunderstandings and led to a commitment to meet face-to-face on a regular basis; we found that conferencing software did not suffice. Moreover, in our zeal to implement formative assessments, the voices of teachers and teacher trainers got muffled until a pilot study confirmed their advice.