ABSTRACT
Science education reforms taking place in the United States (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; Shymansky & Kyle, 1992), Australia (Australian Education Council, 1992), England (Department of Education and Science, 1991), and other countries indicate an increasing awareness that the science curriculum offered in schools is not meeting the needs of society today and is likely to be inadequate for the future. A related component of this reform concerns making judgments about students’ performance as they learn about the curriculum. In most of these reports about curriculum reform, the concerns about examinations and testing are usually presented as refinements of existing technical testing procedures. However, research suggests that current assessment procedures distort and narrow instruction, misrepresent the nature of the subject, and underscore inequities in access to education. Furthermore, current assessment procedures are claimed to not provide valid measures of what students know, and to provide no opportunity for students and teachers to be involved in discussions about the work being assessed (Lorsbach, Tobin, Briscoe, & LaMaster, 1992; Wolf, Bixby, Glenn, & Gardner, 1991).
