Two potentially profound reforms intended to affect education are the subject of this special issue: (1) the emphasis on assessment to improve and certify learning, and (2) the use of technology in the classroom. This volume undertakes to synthesise significant efforts focusing on research and development (R&D) in both assessment and technology. The special issue takes in a broad band in its survey of various examples of scholarly work and its selections run the full assessment gamut from conceiving and preparing useful models for task and test design to the administration, scoring, and interpretation of assessments. It also considers examples that attend to different uses of assessment and tests, from approaches that embed assessments in instructional systems to stand-alone tests. Purposes vary, from measures intended to guide instructional options (of a system or a teacher) to those attempting to identify or classify individual performance. In this short commentary, I will refrain from providing summary observations, section by section, on the special issue's contents. Instead, I too will attempt to take an integrative view, look across the contributions of the writers, and give my impression of the development of the field of technology-based assessment, my views of the particular areas that need to be accelerated, and my thoughts about which efforts will have most immediate or long-term impact, and how R&D might be formulated to acknowledge the speed of technological and policy changes that are essential to the success of the enterprise.
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