A Strategy For Assessing Science

A Strategy for Assessing Science offers strategic advice on the perennial issue of assessing rates of progress in different scientific fields. It considers available knowledge about how science makes progress and examines a range of decision-making strategies for addressing key science policy concerns. These include avoiding undue conservatism that may arise from the influence of established disciplines; achieving rational, high-quality, accountable, and transparent decision processes; and establishing an appropriate balance of influence between scientific communities and agency science managers. A Strategy for Assessing Science identifies principles for setting priorities and specific recommendations for the context of behavioral and social research on aging.

A Strategy for Assessing Science offers strategic advice on the perennial issue of assessing rates of progress in different scientific fields. It considers available knowledge about how science makes progress and examines a range of decision-making strategies for addressing key science policy concerns. These include avoiding undue conservatism that may arise from the influence of established disciplines; achieving rational, high-quality, accountable, and transparent decision processes; and establishing an appropriate balance of influence between scientific communities and agency science managers. A Strategy for Assessing Science identifies principles for setting priorities and specific recommendations for the context of behavioral and social research on aging.

Recent government publications like "Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy" and "Science for all Americans" have given teachers a mandate for improving science education in America. What we know about how learners construct meaning--particularly in the natural sciences--has undergone a virtual revolution in the past 25 years. Teachers, as well as researchers, are now grappling with how to better teach science, as well as how to assess whether students are learning. Assessing Science Understanding is a companion volume to Teaching Science for Understanding, and explores how to assess whether learning has taken place. The book discusses a range of promising new and practical tools for assessment including concept maps, vee diagrams, clinical interviews, problem sets, performance-based assessments, computer-based methods, visual and observational testing, portfolios, explanatory models, and national examinations.

From the use of personal products to our consumption of food, water, and air, people are exposed to a wide array of agents each day-many with the potential to affect health. Exposure Science in the 21st Century: A Vision and A Strategy investigates the contact of humans or other organisms with those agents (that is, chemical, physical, and biologic stressors) and their fate in living systems. The concept of exposure science has been instrumental in helping us understand how stressors affect human and ecosystem health, and in efforts to prevent or reduce contact with harmful stressors. In this way exposure science has played an integral role in many areas of environmental health, and can help meet growing needs in environmental regulation, urban and ecosystem planning, and disaster management. Exposure Science in the 21st Century: A Vision and A Strategy explains that there are increasing demands for exposure science information, for example to meet needs for data on the thousands of chemicals introduced into the market each year, and to better understand the health effects of prolonged low-level exposure to stressors. Recent advances in tools and technologies-including sensor systems, analytic methods, molecular technologies, computational tools, and bioinformatics-have provided the potential for more accurate and comprehensive exposure science data than ever before. This report also provides a roadmap to take advantage of the technologic innovations and strategic collaborations to move exposure science into the future.

Assessment has provided educational institutions with information about student learning outcomes and the quality of education for many decades. But has it informed practice and been fully incorporated into the learning cycle? Conrad and Openo argue that the potential inherent in many of the new learning environments being explored by educators and students has not been fully realized. In this investigation of a variety of assessment methods and learning approaches, the authors aim to discover the tools that engage learners and authentically evaluate education. They insist that moving to new learning environments, specifically those online and at a distance, afford opportunities for educators to adopt only the best practices of traditional face-to-face assessment while exploring evaluation tools made available by a digital learning environment in the hopes of arriving at methods that capture the widest set of learner skills and attributes.