| Abstract:
Educational accountability on the extent desired ends are achieved, rather than evaluating adherence to means, seems useful. Evaluating adherence to prescribed means and ends seems inappropriate, unless the 'one true way' for both means and ends is known. The issue might be more aptly stated, to what ends, and by what means and measures? Constructivism has focused attention on the value of students constructing their own reality through discovery, exploration, and experimentation. National educational standards seek objectives of students learning how to actually do science. This increases the probability that more students will acquire proficiency in problem solving/decision making, learn how to pose their own questions and hypotheses based on theory, and then construct experiments and measurements to seduce reality into revealing itself by systematically applying the scientific process. We compare implications of (1) the measurement of knowledge by using high stakes standardized tests emphasizing the memorization and recall of facts, with (2) observational assessment of behaviors demonstrated when students are actually doing science. A 'Child Exploratory Behavior Observation Scale' (Plummer, 2007) developed using National Educational Science Standards is presented to provide an alternative method to evaluate 'highly-valued-but-difficult-to-measure' doing science behaviors.
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