"The Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research (BEAR) Center has for
the last several years been involved in the development of an assessment system,
which we call the BEAR Assessment System. The system consists of four
principles, each associated with a practical "building block" (Wilson 2005) as
well as an activity that helps integrate the four parts together (see the section
starting on p. 325). Its original deployment was as a curriculum-embedded system
in science (Wilson et al. 2000), but it has clear and logical extensions to
other contexts such as in higher education (Wilson and Scalise 2006), in largescale
assessment (Wilson 2005); and in disciplinary areas, such as chemistry
(Claesgens et al. 2002), and the focus of this chapter, mathematics.
In this paper, the four principles of the BEAR Assessment System are discussed,
and their application to large-scale assessment is described using an example
based on a German assessment of mathematical literacy used in conjunction
with the Program for the International Student Assessment (PISA 2005a);
see also Chapter 7, this volume). The BEAR Assessment System is based on a
conception of a tight inter-relationship between classroom-level and large-scale
assessment (Wilson 2004a; Wilson and Draney 2004). Hence, in the process of
discussing this large-scale application, some arguments and examples will be
directed towards classroom-level applications, or, more accurately, towards the
common framework that binds the two together (Wilson 2004b)."