In an effort to examine issues raised by the effort to assess the performance of educational institutions, a project focusing on the social purposes and intellectual foundations of assessment practices in education was initiated. The primary goal of the project was to explore the possibility of developing new, more appropriate educational…

In the spring of 1979, the National Institute of Education, in collaboration with the United States Office of Education, the UCLA Center for the Study of Evaluation (CSE), and members of a nation-wide network of research and development agencies, sponsored a national colloquy on the theme that testing could have an important impact in improving…