Chapter Highlights

This section highlights key principles, challenges, and innovative frameworks shaping assessment practices in STEM education, with a focus on equity, feedback, and 21st-century skills.

• Assessment in STEM education must move beyond traditional testing to include a broad range of diagnostic, formative, and summative strategies that evaluate high-level, interdisciplinary skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, and applied problem-solving.
• Effective feedback is a cornerstone of high-quality STEM education. When timely, specific, and growth-oriented, feedback empowers learners, supports self-regulation, and sustains the iterative cycles of inquiry and design that underpin STEM learning.
• The Inclusive STEM Assessment Framework (ISAF) is presented as an integrated response to persistent challenges in STEM assessment. Its four pillars—Multi-Modal Measurement, Culturally Responsive Evaluation, Dynamic Assessment, and Empowering Feedback—work synergistically to promote equitable and rigorous assessment practices.
• Major challenges in STEM assessment include managing interdisciplinary complexity, ensuring reliability and validity in non-traditional assessment tasks, strengthening teachers’ assessment literacy, and creating inclusive measurement approaches that accommodate diverse learners.