IN THE JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING Guest Editors: Nancy Butler Songer and Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo As the topic of assessment emerges as a central theme within many areas of education, new opportunities in science education-assessment work arise. As we struggle to understand what it means to make teaching and learning more accountable, we need strong research on the best ways to design, analyze and use assessments for science education. Assessment covers many subareas including formative assessment, summative assessment, assessment of teaching, high stakes tests, international assessments such as TIMSS and PISA, the evaluation of online portfolios, assessment of twenty-first century knowledge and skills, learning progressions, and real-time assessment. The Editors of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching invite you to prepare a manuscript for a forthcoming issue on science education and assessment. In preparing manuscripts, we encourage articles that contain any form of empirical data or that provide important theoretical and foundational grounding for the field. Research approaches could include qualitative or quantitative approaches, theoretical development, or psychometric testing of measures or instruments, such as the assessment of cognitive, behavioral, or affective outcomes at the individual, program, organization, or systems levels. Some possible research questions might be: As we usher in learning goals for twenty-first century science education, what should our assessment look like? What empirical information do we have that helps us understand the status of current classroom-based assessments in science? What kinds of information do chapter tests at the back of textbooks provide for us about student knowledge of motion? How would we design and evaluate a better test of this information? What is the best means to gather information about students' development of scientific explanations about a particular science area, (i.e. biodiversity) over a six-year span associated with a particular learning progression? What new information can we obtain about teacher practices through new technology-based assessments? Manuscript Submission Deadline: January 10, 2012 Reviews returned: March 1, 2012 First revisions due: April 1, 2012 Second revisions due: May 15, 2012 Expected publication: August 2012 Submissions of manuscripts should follow the publication guidelines for the Journal of Research in Science Teaching and be submitted electronically to Manuscript Central (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jrst). Select “Special Issue” option and identify the special theme as “Assessment.” Manuscripts selected after competitive, peer-reviewed process, will be published with reaction from experts in the field. Inquiries concerning the suitability of possible contributions to this special issue should be sent directly by email to one of the Guest Editors: Nancy Butler Songer (songer@umich.edu) or Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo (Maria.Ruiz-Primo@ucdenver.edu).