To help learners to "think and do" what scientists and mathematicians think and do is to provide all students with the power of theory, logic, and application to make sense of the world of today and that of tomorrow. To cause learners to "think and do" in a systematic manner so that the evidence or documentation of that "thinking and doing" can be evaluated systematically is assessment. Schools establish the high expectation of success by creating a stimulating climate in which all students use their minds effectively, assume personal responsibility for learning, and contribute to the learning community.

Within the Learning Framework, the "thinking and doing" in mathematics and science that define the academic expectations for all students are the Habits of Mind, the Vehicles for Understanding and Doing, and the Big Ideas. These three dimensions represent the multi-dimensional nature of thinking and doing in science and in mathematics. The intersections of these dimensions represent the tasks (instructional activities) from which result the products of intellectual work, which then become opportunities for students to demonstrate progress. Together, multiple opportunities for demonstrating each student's progress become systems for teachers to keep track of the individual student's increasing sophistication in the theory, logic, and application of science and mathematics.

These opportunities for demonstrating habits of mind, vehicles for understanding and doing, and big ideas must be constructivist in nature. Just as students have different ways of coming to know, so too do they have multiple ways of demonstrating what they know. And as students grow and mark their progress, they become confident in their ability to learn and use mathematics and science.

In order to support the rigorous development of students, teachers must be good managers of people, of resources, and of time. As managers, teachers need clear, timely, and unambiguous evidence upon which to base decisions. The process of collecting this clear, timely, and unambiguous evidence is referred to within this Learning Framework as a process of documentation. And, just as the Learning Framework recognizes that there are multiple ways of knowing and multiple ways of teaching, so too must there be multiple ways of documenting what is learned.

In order for information about students' intellectual work in science and mathematics to be useful, meaningful, and credible, it must:

• Be consistent with and reflective of teaching and learning in these disciplines.

• Yield timely information that is respected by students and teachers.

• Enable multiple users of the information to make comparable interpretations of the intellectual work.

• Provide comparable and consistent evidence of intellectual work over time.

These opportunities for students to demonstrate periodically their Habits of Mind, Vehicles for Understanding and Doing, and Big Ideas can represent assessment opportunities if the opportunities themselves are positioned appropriately. It is important to remember that assessments are useful because they capture representative samples of student behavior in a systematic way. With respect to the Learning Framework, assessments have an important role in documenting evidence of the intellectual work that students produce in mathematics and science.

Conventional multiple-choice assessments will not fully document the complex intellectual activity and capture the thinking and doing in mathematics and science. Forms of assessment that examine students progress in learning to explain new concepts, and applying knowledge to new situations might include; open-ended questions, tasks that lend themselves to multiple solutions, essays, and complex multiple-choice questions.

Samples of each student's intellectual work have value because they are collected in comparable or systematic ways. This feature ensures that all students have equivalent opportunities to demonstrate their "thinking and doing" in mathematics and science.

The second necessary feature is an extension of the systematic conduct of the assessment opportunity; that is the systematic judging of student work, or scoring. Again, the systematic nature of the judging of student work ensures equity and fairness.

As learning in science and mathematics follows the intersections of Habits of Mind, Vehicles for Understanding and Doing, and Big Ideas, there will be assessment opportunities that can be summarized (scored) by comparing the intellectual work with unambiguous and well-accepted standards. The student work itself must vary in complexity, amount of effort required, format of evidence, and importance just as the underlying instruction will vary in these same dimensions over the course of a year's instruction in science or mathematics. When taken as a whole, however, the accumulated evidence or documentation of students' intellectual work becomes a vivid image of each student's internalized habits of mind, vehicles for understanding and doing, and big ideas internalized.

These two features, systematic implementation and systematic scoring, distinguish assessment opportunities from instructional activities. Because assessment opportunities are expected to provide credible evidence of learning, they must have clear safeguards for equity and fairness.

Equity and fairness take on very specific attributes in discussions of accountability assessment. Empirical evidence from assessments can be used to examine issues of adverse impact for specific populations. Likewise, item data from diverse populations can be used to remove items from assessments that evoke qualitatively different performance from different population groups while holding overall performance constant. These attributes require large databases and are typically inappropriate for analyzing classroom assessments.

However, the limits of our analytical techniques do not excuse us from addressing the importance of fairness and equity for classroom assessments as well. In fact, the issue is just as important - and in many ways perhaps more important - because assessments occur in the classroom much more often than accountability assessments occur; and, thus, they have a much greater potential for negative impact on students' and teachers' perceptions and on conduct. Assessment - as with all other learning experiences - must contribute positively to the student's intellectual growth, academic curiosity, independence, and self-esteem.

One approach to fairness and equity in classroom assessment is to broaden both the focus of the assessment and possible modes of response. This move to accommodate the multiple ways of knowing that undergirds the constructivist approach is in keeping with fairness and equity, if all students are provided the same flexibility in their instructional experiences. The Diversity Framework articulates this vision in the Principle of Academic Integrity:

Learning experiences are characterized by fairness, with equity and excellence for all learners and are supported by challenging curriculum, instruction and assessment.

Assessment in mathematics and science has received much attention in recent years, in part because of an emphasis on accountability and in part because of the often poor match between what mathematics and science teachers want to teach (and how they want to teach it) and the content of traditional assessment tools. [29] The correspondence between learning and assessment must govern the character of the documentation opportunities for every student. In this regard, the models for teaching and learning in mathematics and science must govern selection of assessment opportunities. There is not one, and only one, right way to document what students think and do; there must be as many different ways of documenting knowing as there are ways of knowing.

Too often, tests designed for other purposes have been used unintentionally as filters that deny underrepresented groups access to the further study of mathematics (and science). Today, the mathematical (and scientific) development of each child in a diverse multicultural society must be valued. Assessment procedures must no longer be used to deny students the opportunity to learn important mathematics (and science). Instead, assessment should be a means of fostering growth toward high expectations. To do otherwise represents a waste of human potential (NCTM, Assessment Standards, p. 1).

The benefits of this vision of teaching, learning, and assessment cannot be overstated. A teacher who is able to assess students' knowledge, skills, and dispositions in a variety of ways can better understand what and how students know, what they do not know, and what strategies can be employed during mathematical and scientific tasks of various levels of complexity. A student who has a variety of ways to demonstrate knowledge, skills, and dispositions can build upon personal strengths while enhancing potential abilities.

Assessment should provide teachers and students with periodic and systematic snapshots of how students organize their science and mathematics knowledge, as well as information about students' progress and motivation. It should reflect the values of mathematics and science education. What is documented must be what is important, not just what is easy. "If students are to investigate, explore, and discover, assessment must not measure just mimicry in mathematics and/or science. By confusing means and ends, by making testing more important than learning, present practice holds today's students hostage to yesterday's mistakes." [30]

The skills that undergird mathematical and scientific power include not only traditional skills but also many broader capabilities. For example, all students must be able to:

• Make decisions based on the collection, representation, and interpretation of real data.

• Use tables, graphs, spreadsheets, and statistical techniques to organize, interpret, and present numerical information.

• Judge the validity of mathematical, scientific, and technical information presented by the media and others.

• Use scientific process skills as a reasoning tool.

• Perform mental calculations and estimations with proficiency.

The role of assessment is to serve learning and teaching by being grounded in the knowledge, skills, and dispositions all students will need for future success. Multiple forms of evidence are needed to support a sensitive educational environment in which all students are valued and will think and do as scientists and mathematicians think and do.

The new assessment paradigm, which speaks to the need for diversity in assessment opportunities, acknowledges that there is not likely to be one system or one process that works to produce students who can think, who have scientific habits of mind, and who are mentally fit. In fact, the more that is known about instruction, learning behavior, learning style, and intelligence, the less reasonable it is to impose a single process for learning. Likewise, it is presumptuous to impose a process for assessment on students that does not recognize individuality, previous experiences, and cultures. This somewhat radical paradigm shift [31] opens the door to innovative assessment in the service of education.

With this paradigm shift, the following changes are likely to occur:

Assessment offers a continuum, from traditional multiple-choice tests to open-ended free-response tests. At each end of the continuum, and at the infinite number of points along that continuum, can be opportunities for students to demonstrate that they can think and do what scientists and mathematicians think and do.

Another way to describe the assessment paradigm shift is to define the shifting elements:

As the earlier discussions of Habits of Mind, Vehicles for Understanding and doing, and Big Ideas suggest, it is likely that assessment opportunities will become more and more complex. Assessments that focus on discrete knowledge and skills will become less and less valuable to students, and to teachers, because they are less likely to describe the essence of our vision for all Georgia students to think and do what scientists and mathematicians think and do.