Contemporary educational accountability systems, including state-level systems prescribed under No Child Left Behind as well as those envisioned under the "Race to the Top" comprehensive assessment competition, rely on school-level summaries of student test scores. The precision of these score summaries is almost always evaluated using models that…

"Scaling" is the process of constructing a score scale that associates numbers or other ordered indicators with the performance of examinees. Scaling typically is conducted to aid users in interpreting test results. This module describes different types of raw scores and scale scores, illustrates how to incorporate various sources of…

We addressed the challenge of scoring cognitive interviews in research involving multiple cultural groups. We interviewed 123 fourth- and fifth-grade students from three cultural groups to probe how they related a mathematics item to their personal lives. Item meaningfulness--the tendency of students to relate the content and/or context of an item…

In large-scale assessments, such as state-wide testing programs, national sample-based assessments, and international comparative studies, there are many steps involved in the measurement and reporting of student achievement. There are always sources of inaccuracies in each of the steps. It is of interest to identify the source and magnitude of…