Broadening Assessment,Improving Fairness? Some examples from school science

Following a review of equity issues in testing, especially in relation to science, two assessment programmes in school science, each of which was designed both to probe a range of aspects of student performance and for use in a large-scale study, are discussed. Both have been developed and used in the 1990s, one in Australia only and the other in many countries. The programmes and the range of aspects they attempt to assess are described and results are cited for several groups of students. Issues of fairness through the broadening of large-scale assessments to include tasks requiring students to construct their answers or carry out investigations are addressed as the second focus of the paper.