The Committee on the Foundations of Assessment produced this report, with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), to review and synthesize advances in the cognitive and measurement sciences and to explore the implications of those advances for improving educational assessment. Interest in the intersection of these two fields is not new. Prompted by calls for assessments that can better inform and support learning, a number of education researchers have put forth the potential benefits of merging modern knowledge in the areas of cognition and learning and methods of educational measurement (Baker, 1997; Cronbach and Gleser, 1965; Glaser, 1981; Glaser and Silver, 1994; Messick, 1984; Mislevy, 1994; National Academy of Education, 1996; Nichols, 1994; Pellegrino, Baxter, and Glaser, 1999; Snow and Lohman, 1993; Wilson and Adams, 1996).

Several decades of research in the cognitive sciences has advanced the knowledge base about how children develop understanding, how people reason and build structures of knowledge, which thinking processes are associated with competent performance, and how knowledge is shaped by social context (National Research Council [NRC], 1999b). These findings, presented in Chapter 3, suggest directions for revamping assessment to provide better information about students’ levels of understanding, their thinking strategies, and the nature of their misunderstandings.

During this same period, there have been significant developments in measurement (psychometric) methods and theory. As presented in Chapter 4, a wide array of statistical measurement methods are currently available to support the kinds of inferences that cognitive research suggests are important to pursue when assessing student achievement.

Meanwhile, computer and telecommunications technologies are making it possible to assess what students are learning at very fine levels of detail,