The BEAR Assessment System is an integrated approach to developing assessments that provide meaningful interpretations of student work relative to the cognitive and developmental goals of a curriculum. It is grounded by four key principles guiding assessment development and includes four building blocks (each associated with one of the principles) that are tools for constructing meaningful assessments aligned with curricular goals and instructional activities. These principles are:
1.Assessment should be based on a developmental perspective of student learning.
2.What is taught and what is assessed must be clearly aligned.
3.Teachers are the managers and users of assessment data.
4.Classroom assessment must uphold sound standards of validity and reliability.
These four principles also relate to the Assessment Triangle developed by the National Research Council Committee on the Foundations of Assessment and published in their report, Knowing What Students Know. The Assessment Triangle, shown in Figure 1, is a model of the essential connections and dependencies present in a coherent and useful assessment system. In this triangle, assessment activities (the observation vertex) must be aligned with the knowledge and cognitive processes (the cognition vertex) one wishes to affect through the instructional process, and the scoring and interpretation of student work (the interpretation vertex) must reflect measures of the same knowledge and cognitive processes. Meaningful connections among the three vertices, cognition, observation, and interpretation, are deemed essential for assessment to have a positive impact on learning. We refer to this whole process as construct modeling.