Paper introduces a collection of papers on educational assessment, noting controversies surrounding both old and new assessment methods, discussing the persistent set of technical issues that must be addressed by the research community in measurement, and examining work by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student…

This study investigated how domain specifications controlled topic and rater reliability. History students completed three performance tasks. For each topic, they took prior knowledge tests, read primary materials, and wrote explanatory essays. Using a theory-based scoring rubric, four raters scored all essays. The rubric worked similarly on the…