AAAS's Project 2061 Answers Need
for High-Quality K-12 Assessment
Through its Benchmarks for Science Literacy and other resources,
Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) has influenced the way states across the country
develop and use K-12 science content standards. Now Project 2061,
AAAS's education reform initiative, is working to ensure that assessment
is meaningfully tied to those standards.
With funding from the National Science Foundation's Instructional
Materials Development (IMD) Assessment Program, Project 2061 has
begun a five-year, $4.1 million project to develop a collection
of high-quality middle- and early high-school science and mathematics
assessment items-including multiple choice and open-response questions.
The resulting bank of some 400 items will be electronically linked
to state and national science content standards and accessible online.
"We absolutely must have better tools for finding out if students
are learning what we expect them to learn. Currently, there simply
aren't enough high-quality test items linked to content standards," said
George DeBoer, deputy director of Project 2061 and principal investigator
for the assessment project. "With these new items, educational researchers
will be able to answer important questions about the impact of various
curriculum materials and instructional strategies, and teachers
will be able to find out what their students know and can do and
to pinpoint areas where they need more help."
The new effort builds on Project 2061's ongoing studies of assessment,
which have found that too many science and math items are poorly
written and fail to measure the knowledge for which students are
being held responsible. While many existing items cover a general
topic such as cells or fractions, few are aligned to the precise
concepts targeted by content standards.
In contrast, the items to be included in Project 2061's new collection
will be specially designed to provide explicit evidence that a student
has-or has not-learned a specific idea or skill. This precision
and the diagnostic assessment it makes possible have new urgency
given the standards-based testing requirements of the No Child Left
Behind Act.
To make its assessment resources widely available to teachers,
curriculum and test developers, researchers, and the general public,
Project 2061 will provide online access to items through an interface
adapted from the conceptual strand maps in its popular Atlas of
Science Literacy. Interactive maps will allow users to search by
state standard, national standard, topic, or type of assessment
item.
For more information about Project 2061's work on testing and
assessment, visit www.project2061.org/research/assessment.htm.
18 March 2004
Related Information:
Linking Middle and Early High School
Science and Mathematics Assessment Items to Local, State, and
National Content Standards
A Proposal Submitted to the Division of Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education
under the IMD Assessment Program
Contact Information:
Mary Koppal
(202) 326-6643
Monica Amarelo
(202) 326-6431
mamarelo@aaas.org
