Assessment, Applied Developmental

Nancy A. Busch-Rossnagel

Assessment has become a fact of life for today's infants, children, and adolescents and their families. School testing grew after the 1983 report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) documented that American students lagged behind students in other developed countries in school performance. The response was to articulate academic standards and then to create standardized tests to assess whether the standards are being met. In spring 2002, the result was Public Law 107–110, the No Child Left Behind Act, which sets specific goals for performance on standardized tests and ties federal aid for education to the testing results. The federal and state mandates represent a traditional “one size fits all” approach that can provide an assessment of minimum competencies, but it is ill suited to understanding the complexities of individual human development or of changes as a result of educational reforms. However, work in applied ...

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