Chapter 20 offers insight on the qualities of assessments that are best able to support learners’ linguistic progress. The four principles of assessment are presented to equip teachers with the knowledge they need to select, adjust, and design assessments for their unique learning contexts. Alternative assessments, like e-portfolios, are also discussed as ways in which teachers can improve learners’ attitudes toward the target language.

This chapter explains the role of national and state/territory education authorities in providing guidance for teachers when assessing students’ knowledge, understanding and skills in primary science education. It also presents a range of strategies which allow students to demonstrate their knowledge and understandings at various time points (before, during and after) in science learning sequences. While the notion of assessment often relates to teacher judgements of what students do or do not know and how well they know it, a key goal in education is to develop students’ metacognitive abilities so that they can judge their own learning themselves. The focus needs to be on inclusive strategies and resources that improve not prove learning (Skamp & Preston, 2021), while positioning students as knowledge constructors and sharers rather than knowledge consumers. Strategies for identifying students’ learning in the Australian Curriculum: Science will be explored.

Assessments need to demonstrate that students have achieved the intended outcomes as anticipated. For students to succeed, they also need to be assessed in ways that support their learning and for tasks to be structured in a way that is ongoing, so they can learn and grow from the feedback. Thus, assessment is meant to be more than an exam or an assignment that is given at the end of the unit. An integrated STEM project draws upon multiple disciplines. This chapter is about assessment, project based-learning, integrated STEM, the Australian Curriculum and the connections between them. It also raises some of the issues and challenges that have been highlighted in the literature on these areas. The chapter also focuses on how diagnostic, formative and summative assessments can be administered. Connections are made between these assessment strategies and how they can be situated in some of the projects that are presented in this book. The chapter also presents some suggestions on how the General Capabilities of the Australian Curriculum can be incorporated into integrated STEM projects.

“In Chapter 9, the authors discuss the ability of good language teachers to employ a range of formative and summative assessment practices to assess the individual learner’s needs and to address these needs in their instructional practice. The authors draw on the analysis of responses given by language practitioners in the higher education setting to suggest that learning-oriented assessment can enhance language teaching by helping learners engage with assessment feedback and benefit from it.”