ABSTRACT
Assessment, the determination of students’ capability and learning through performance, is at the heart of educational endeavors, from personal growth to forming policy. Can assessment be more tightly linked to research on learning? Where is there clear integration of research on learning and assessment? Although both learning and assessment have a prodigious research literature, and scholarship in one may often proceed without reference to the other, we can find syntheses, analyses, and research over the years that connect them. The publications Knowing What Students Know (Pellegrino, Chudowsky, & Glaser, 2001), How People Learn (Donovan, Bransford, & Pellegrino, 1999), and Shepard (2000) show the importance of integrating learning research in instruction and assessment design and illustrate the deep roots of both in the psychological literature (Cronbach & Suppes, 1969). These roots can be seen in research-based instructional programs (for instance, those from R&D centers in Pittsburgh and Wisconsin) in the 1960s and 1970s (see Baker, 1973; Lumsdaine & Glaser, 1960), which incorporated research on feedback, learner control, practice, scaffolding, and sequencing. These early systems translated into practice the best research available at the time. New instructional systems required new ways to assess performance, emphasizing the importance of bounded domains of learning rather than broader surveys of general content knowledge. This need led to the emergence of objectives-based or criterion-referenced tests, presaging today’s standardsbased tests (see Glaser, 1963; Hively, Patterson, & Page, 1968).
