Many educators are aware that a key to the assessment of mastery in many areas of science education may lie in the development of instruments which can assess the ability of students to retain the knowledge learned from one course to the next, as well as the related ability to transfer that knowledge to different contexts. Thus, the ability to track students progress throughout a science curriculum becomes essential to the development and testing of such assessment tools.
More generally, longitudinal student records provide information valuable for course, curricula, and program assessment. Moreover, recent developments in database technology, now make it feasible for faculty, departments, and colleges (with little outside help) to inform their decisions about courses, curricula, and programs with data that can tell them, e.g., how a certain group of students in one course (or sequence) faired in another course (or sequence) years later. In addition, they can examine longitudinal demographic outcomes, such as what are the graduation rates gender, ethnicity, and majors of students who take their freshman sequences, etc.. For these reasons, assessment of longitudinal student outcomes is likely to become an essential component of many evaluation plans in the years to come.