Background/Context: Education policy over the past 40 years has focused on the importance of accountability in school improvement. Although much of the scholarly discourse around testing and assessment is technical and statistical, understanding of validity by a non-specialist audience is essential as long as test results drive our educational…

This chapter addresses assessment (testing) with an emphasis on the 100-year period since the American Education Research Association was formed. The authors start with definitions and explanations of contemporary tests. They then look backward into the 19th century to significant work by Horace Mann and Herbert Spencer, who engendered two…

This report analyzes the validity issues that arise in the context of educational accountability systems. The report addresses validity from three interlocking perspectives. The first explores the theory of action underlying accountability provisions. It considers problems emerging from the distance between aspirations for accountability in…

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…

A series of studies by the Technical Review Panel (TRP) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to improve the quality and utility of the NAEP is introduced, with a description of the NAEP, the creation of the TRP, the education policy issues that influenced the selection of research topics, and the relationship among the…

Ways to improve the validity of assessment of college students are discussed. Validity problems often have occurred because the purpose of assessment was not clear. Traditionally, college students have been tested for admission and placement. However, the results of these tests have been used for other purposes, such as comparing institutions.…

Over the last 20 years, writing about technology (and more recently about its use in assessment systems) has been a joyful experience, in part because the author was usually right about how fast and how unexpected technology progress would be made. In this article, the author suggests to rethink assessment systems from design perspectives and the…

This paper presents a discussion of outcome assessment that puts into context how measurement has evolved to its present state. Several types of testing and assessment options are considered against a background of validity. Criterion-referenced measurement is discussed extensively in terms of history, field study, identity problems, intellectual…

The National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) is a partnership of the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Stanford University, The RAND Corporation, the University of Pittsburgh, the Educational Testing Service, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.…

Work on the development of history performance assessments is described. So far, six complete sets of assessments in United States history have been developed as part of this project. Students are first assessed on their historical knowledge of the period through a short-answer test. They are then asked to write an essay explaining the positions…