The purpose of this article is to suggest ways of using research on children's reasoning and learning to elaborate on existing national standards and to improve large-scale and classroom assessments. The authors suggest that "learning progressions"--descriptions of successively more sophisticated ways of reasoning within a content domain based on…

Introduces the idea of usability as a guiding principle for the successful design of sustainable and scalable science curricula. Presents a framework for examining usability in school contexts. (Author/SOE)