A central tenet of the assessment reforms of recent years (“authentic,” “performance,”
etc.) has been the WYTIWYG principle—“What you test is what
you get.” This principle has led the way for assessment reform at the state or
district level nationwide. The assumption behind this principle is that assessment
reforms will not only affect assessments per se, but these effects will trickle
down into the curriculum and instruction that students receive in their daily
work in classrooms. Hence, when one looks to the curricula that students are
experiencing, one would expect to see such effects, and, in particular, one would
expect to see these effects even more strongly in the cutting-edge curricula that
central research agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)
sponsor. Thus it is troubling to find that this does not seem to be the case: An
NSF review of new middle school science curricula [NSF 1997] found only one
where the assessment itself reflected the recent developments in assessment.
For that one (the IEY Assessment System—see [Wilson et al. 2000]), it was
found that the reformed assessment did indeed seem to have the desired sorts
of effects [Wilson and Sloane 2000], but for the other curricula no such effects
were possible, because the assessment reforms have not, in general, made it into
them.