For the past decade there have been a series of reform efforts in science education calling for more emphasis on science literacy and inquiry-based pedagogies and on development of science curriculum that emphasizes the connections between ideas and skil
A discussion of features relevent to the design of academic assessments, part of the Principled Assessment Designs for Inquiry (PADI) project (http://padi.sri.com/ ). Foundational software released in separate project, http://emo.sourceforge.net/