Exit Tickets are a great way to assess student understanding quickly. The CCCs provide a great opportunity to create science exit tickets.
What are exit tickets?
Exit tickets are short assessments provided to students at the end of a class period. Students usually use this assessment as a ticket out the door.
Exit tickets are great assessments because they allow the teacher to quickly see how well students understand a concept. They can also be quickly graded. To learn more about how exit tickets can be used in an NGSS aligned class, check out this blog post.
How to Create Science Exit Tickets Using the Crosscutting Concepts
When I create an exit ticket for the Crosscutting Concepts, or CCCs, I use the NSTA Matrix. The NSTA Matrix describes the Crosscutting Concepts for each grade level band. It also breaks the CCC's into subcomponents.
I write a question based on one of the subcomponents of the CCCs. You can choose a subcomponent in one of two ways. You can use the CCC that is associated with the performance expectation that you are trying to address. Or, you can choose a different CCC that relates to your content.
When you are comfortable with creating exit ticket, I suggest that you do both. This will give students additional opportunities to address the CCC in your class.
Choose the subcomponent of the CCC Matrix that makes the most sense. Then, write a question that relates to the phenomenon that you are investigating or the content that you are covering.
Sample Exit Ticket Prompt
First, I will write an exit ticket for MS-LS1-3. The performance expectation for MS-LS1-3 reads as follows:
Use argument supported by evidence for how the body is a system of interacting subsystems composed of
groups of cells.
In this case, the CCC in the performance expectation is Systems and System models. The subcomponent of the CCC states that students understand that systems may be made of smaller subsystems. In this case, the body is the larger system and organ systems may be subsystems. Here are a couple questions you could ask:
- Describe how____________ and __________ organ systems work together.
- How does the organ system help the organism?
In both cases, I would provide students with the name of the organ systems.
Purchase Crosscutting Concept Exit Tickets on TPT.
If you want to save yourself some time, you can purchase the exit tickets that I have already created in my TPT store.

How to use these exit tickets.
I want to make sure that these exit tickets work well for you. So I created this video to show you how I update them. This video explains how they can be used in class, using Google Classroom, or in a distance learning setting.
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