The theme of the 2011 Physics Education Research (PER) Conference was "Frontiers in Assessment: Instrumentation, Goals & Practices".

In a sense, assessments are the instruments of physics education research, and our understanding of teaching and learning is only as good as our understanding of what our instruments can (and cannot) tell us. Physics education researchers use assessments to probe diverse aspects of learning, such as student knowledge, reasoning processes, attitudes and beliefs, and abilities. Researchers must think deeply about the assessments that are used, including their validity and reliability; methodology; alignment with learning, teaching, and research goals; overall purpose; implicit assumptions; and how our current assessment instruments are or are not meeting our objectives as teachers, researchers and learners. PERC 2011 highlighted this theme of assessment, bringing the issue into the foreground of the PER community.