Assessment Technologies and Real World Answers

While looking for some examples of assessment technology, I ran across the following:
The Development of a New Scientific Instrument: "Views on Science-Technology-Society" (VOSTS)
This article describes the method for developing an instrument that would assess what students already know about science, as well as their views about what they know. The authors state that many instruments designed to assess scientific knowledge make an assumption that the student understand the test questions in the same way the researcher does. This introduces questions of validity for the instrument. To address this, the authors determined to use a different approach for instrument development.
The authors wrote a series of questions to which 5000 students responded both with multiple choice, likert scale, paragraph, and oral responses to determine what prevailing beliefs students had about science-technology-society content. Based on these responses, they created an instrument with a variety of responses that could potentially reflect student views and knowledge. They stated the empirical development methodology provides a more reliable instrument for accurately assessing what students understand, and could be used for both pre- and post-test scenarios. The instrument was developed in 1992 in Canada. The methodology was described in detail, and could be replicated to meet national or state standards and to reflect regional diversity.
Copies may be obtained by writing VOSTS, Department of Curriculum Studies, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK. S7N OWO, Canada.
It seems to me it could be highly useful in determining the "stickiness" of science teaching. I have often felt that simple multiple choice assessments don't capture the full understanding of a learning experience, and are limited by the individual writing them. I have often argued (silently) with multiple choice tests over a variety of responses that I felt did not reflect what the question was asking. The approach described here seems to address those issues well.

Resource:
Aikenhead, G. S., & Ryan, A. G. (1992). The development of a new scientific instrument: "Views on science-technology-society" (VOSTS) [Electronic version]. Science Education, 76, 477-491. Retrieved June 26, 2007, from http://www.usask.ca/education/people/aikenhead/vosts_2.pdf