Since the IBM Type 805 Test Soring Machine first hit the market in 1938, fill-in-the-bubble score sheets and scanners have remained the dominant technologies used in local, state, and national assessments. Test booklets and bubble sheets—along with a well-developed set of psychometric principles—are now so deeply embedded in the culture that for many Americans, they are synonymous with assessment.

But underlying the pre-World War II technologied are approaches to testing from the same era, which rely heavily on multiple choice questions and measure only a portion of the skills and knowledge outlined in state education standards. These approaches do not align well with what we know about how students learn. Nor do they tell us much about to help students do better. As a result, at a time when we're testing students more than ever—and using those results to make critical judgments about the performance of schools, teachers, and students—our testing methods don;t serve our education system nearly as well as they should.

An alternative—performance-based testing—reached its zenith in the late 1980s and early 1990s. States began to experiment with using projects, portfolios, exhibitions, and other activities to measure content mastery. But the state' performance assessments were costly and technically inadequate for use in school accountability systems. Significant problems were also reported concerning the reliability of such programs' assessment scores (Koretz, McCaffrey, Klein, Bell, & Stecher, 1992). As a result states began to move away from performance-based assessment systems back to less-expensive multiple choice assessments.

But now the convergence of powerful computer technologies and important developmentsin cognitive science holds out the prospect of a new generation of student testing—one that could significantly improve teaching and learning. These technologies, which feature the efficiency and consistency of machine read scoring along with cognitively challenging, open-ended performance tasks, can help us build assessments that move beyond bubble-filling and, at the same time, offer rigorous and reliable evidence of student learning.

Read the full article in the November 2009 issue of ASCD's Educational Leadership.