The purpose of this article is to suggest ways of using research on children's reasoning and learning to elaborate on existing national standards and to improve large-scale and classroom assessments. The authors suggest that "learning progressions"--descriptions of successively more sophisticated ways of reasoning within a content domain based on…

This article presents the authors' response to the commentaries on their article. They focus on two important issues raised by most of the reviewers: (a) the curricular dependence of the proposed learning progression and the daunting (twin) challenges of bringing about changes in curriculum and assessment and consolidating and validating the…