Many educators are shifting their teaching strategies and approaches to include more emphasis on critical thinking skills, the communication of ideas, a variety of approaches to content emphasizing varied student learning styles, and the need to draw explicit connections among topics for retention of learning. Real-world assessment measures, then,…

This report describes a project to develop more effective types of assessment in high school classes. The targeted population was high school students in two different middle-class communities in the northern suburbs of Chicago (Illinois). One site in a very stable, homogeneous community, predominantly white, contains 1,155 students. The other…

To help determine how the introduction of alternate assessment can be structured to maximize its acceptance and long-term adoption by teachers, a case study was conducted of the introduction of alternate assessment in a suburban middle school in the spring of 1991. Three seventh-grade life science teachers, three eighth-grade physical science…