“You are a group of student representatives from the School Environmental Club. You are going to submit a pamphlet to a panel from the National Environment Agency, illustrating ways to handle the problem of increasing temperature globally. What will you do?”

All Secondary 1 students at Crescent Girls’ School experience curriculum integration which is a powerful vehicle to develop connections between sometimes natural and sometimes seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge and skills, and between students’ experiences and backgrounds and what they learn in school. Students have the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills acquired from 3 integrated subjects, namely Mathematics, Science and Geography to demonstrate their understanding of what they have learnt. The performance task described above encompasses both content and process skills, requiring students to work in groups to use their content knowledge in the 3 subjects to come up with innovative and creative solutions to address the issues of global warming.

This paper describes efforts of the school in implementing integrated curriculum to all Secondary 1 students to achieve outcomes beyond curriculum standards to include social responsibility and life skills for the 21st century learning. It describes how the use of performance task engages students in authentic learning to assess their understanding of content knowledge as well as process skills in problem solving and creativity to address the task requirements. The paper also shares the assessment rubrics that the teachers have designed to evaluate the quality of the students’ work and how this is used to further refine the task for future implementation. Feedback and student reflections are gathered from the students and these become essential resources in the school’s continuing effort to improve student learning through alternative assessment approaches to teaching and learning.