Two of the most interesting conceptual turns in Richard E. Snow's thinking called for: a broadening of the concept of aptitude to include not only cognitive processes, but also affective and cognative processes as essential for understanding academic performance and learning; and an exploration of the possibility that individual differences in learning and achievement emerge from dynamic person-situation transactions that unfold over time. The articles in this special issue address these "big ideas" through the lens of a study of high school students' achievement in science.

Accrediting boards, the federal government, and state legislatures are now requiring a greater level of accountability from higher education. However, current accountability practices, including accreditation, No Child Left Behind, and performance reporting are inadequate to the task. If wielded indiscriminately, accountability can actually do more harm than good. This innovative work looks broadly at how accountability is being considered by campuses, accrediting boards, higher education organizations, and governments in the US and abroad. It explores how new demands for accountability and new technologies are changing the way student learning is assessed.
The author, one of the most respected assessment researchers in the nation, provides a framework for assessing student learning and discusses historical and contemporary debates in the field. He details new directions in assessment, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment he helped develop, analyzes exemplary campus assessment programs, and proposes considerations necessary for designing successful accountability systems.

Accrediting boards, the federal government, and state legislatures are now requiring a greater level of accountability from higher education. However, current accountability practices, including accreditation, No Child Left Behind, and performance reporting are inadequate to the task. If wielded indiscriminately, accountability can actually do more harm than good. This innovative work looks broadly at how accountability is being considered by campuses, accrediting boards, higher education organizations, and governments in the US and abroad. It explores how new demands for accountability and new technologies are changing the way student learning is assessed.
The author, one of the most respected assessment researchers in the nation, provides a framework for assessing student learning and discusses historical and contemporary debates in the field. He details new directions in assessment, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment he helped develop, analyzes exemplary campus assessment programs, and proposes considerations necessary for designing successful accountability systems.

This paper proposes the use of students science notebooks as one possible unobtrusive method for examining some aspects of teaching quality. Students science notebooks were used to examine the nature of instructional activities in their science classrooms, the nature of teachers' feedback, and how these two aspects of teaching were correlated with student achievement. Researchers examined the characteristics of science notebooks for 6 students from each of 10 fifth-grade classrooms. Each entry was analyzed. Results indicate that raters can consistently classify students notebooks in spite of the diversity of the forms of communication (written, schematic, or pictorial). They can also consistently score the quality of a students communication, conceptual, and procedural understanding and the quality of a teachers' feedback to the student. The intellectual demands of the tasks required by the teachers were, in general, low. Teachers tended to ask students to record the results of an experiment or to copy definitions. Low student performance scores across two curriculum units revealed that students communication skills and understanding were far from the maximum score and did not improve over the course of instruction during the school year. Teacher provided little, if any, feedback. Only 4 of the 10 teachers provided any feedback to students notebook entries, and when feedback was provide, comments took the form of a grade, checkmark, or a code phrase. It is concluded that the benefits of science notebooks as a learning tool for students and a source of information for teachers were not exploited in the science classrooms studied. An appendix describes the performance assessments these students used. (Contains 4 figures, 7 tables, and 25 references.) (Author/SLD).

"A must for teachers doing hands-on science! Straightforward and user-friendly for even the beginning teacher."
Debby West, Science Teacher,
Medea Middle School
Oak Park, California

"I wish I'd had this book when I started teaching 12 years ago."
Dave Jelinek, Researcher
Ph.D. Candidate

If you want to make sure your students are learning, you must somehow measure their progress. But how can you do that in a science program where the students "construct knowledge" for themselves instead of memorizing facts? Brown and Shavelson show you exactly what to do in this useful guide to science performance assessment. This book helps you answer these questions:

• Why should you use performance assessments for your hands-on science program?
• What can you "measure" that you can't just observe?
• How can you score the responses to give meaning in a grading context?
• Which performance assessment will work best for your (and your students') purposes?

Find out which kinds of assessments and scoring systems work best for your classroom. You'll learn how to measure precisely what your students know and understand about the science they're learning. The step-by-step instructions here will help you choose assessment methods that provide reliable, valid, measurable evaluations of your students' performance.

The authors give you samples of completed score forms to help you assess your own classroom findings. They also include model assessments that look and feel so much like regular, hands-on science curricula that your students won't even realize they're being tested! If you teach hands-on science, or if you plan to start, this book has practical information you can use right now.

Accessible to any professional or researcher who has a basic understanding of analysis of variance, Shavelson and Webb offer an intuitive development of generalizability theory, a technique for estimating the relative magnitudes of various components of error variation and for indicating the most efficient strategy for achieving desired measurement precision. Covering a variety of topics such as generalizability studies with nested facets and with fixed facets, measurement error and generalizability coefficients, and decision studies with same and with different designs, the text includes exercises so the reader may practice the application of each chapter's material. By using detailed illustrations and examples, Shavelson and Webb clearly describe the logic underlying major concepts in generalizability theory to enable readers to apply these methods when investigating the consistency of their own measurements.