The Virtual Assessments project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is a recently funded project of the United States Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The goal of The Virtual Assessments Project is to develop and study the feasibility of using immersive technologies to assess middle school students' science inquiry learning.

We are using the Evidence-Centered Design framework (Mislevey, Steinberg, Almond, 2003) to develop virtual performance assessments for scientific inquiry for use in school settings as a standardized component of an accountability program.

This work is based on our prior research on River City a middle school curriculum based on inquiry skills delivered via immersive technology.