In recent years, educators, administrators, policymakers, and measurement experts have called for assessments that support educators in making better instructional decisions. One promising approach to measurement to support instructional decision-making is diagnostic classification models (DCMs). DCMs are flexible psychometric models that…

This commentary focuses on one of the positive impacts of COVID-19, which was to tie societal inequity to testing in a manner that could motivate the reimagining of our field. That reimagining needs to account for our nation's dramatically changing demographics so that assessment generally, and standardized testing specifically, better fit the…

In the Bookmark standard-setting procedure, panelists are instructed to consider what examinees know rather than what they might attain by guessing; however, because examinees sometimes do guess, the procedure includes a correction for guessing. Like other corrections for guessing, the Bookmark's correction assumes that examinees either know the…

This article provides a history of the two large-scale assessment consortia that were funded in 2010 as part of the Race to the Top Competition, the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC), and the Smarter-Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). I compare the goals the consortia were funded to meet between 2011…

Owing to the break-out of the COVID-19 pandemic, students have to take more online learning than offline, and large-scale education assessment programs have to be suspended or postponed. How could education assessment adapt to large-scale online learning? How could the effect and safety of online assessment be improved? What role should formative…

We have the ability to capture data from students' interactions with digital environments as they engage in learning activity. This provides the potential for a reimagining of assessment to one in which assessment become part of our natural education activity and can be used to support learning. These new data allow us to more closely examine the…

This article is a written version of the Presidential Address I gave at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in April 2017. It is a call to NCME members (and others who read this, of course) to rebalance their focus so that classroom assessments are seen as being at least as important as large-scale…

Student learning outcomes assessment has been increasingly used in U.S. higher education institutions over the last 10 years, partly fueled by the recommendation from the Spellings Commission that institutions need to demonstrate more direct evidence of student learning. To respond to the Commission's call, various accountability initiatives have…

The dominant narrative for assessment design seems to reflect a strong, albeit largely implicit undercurrent of purpose purism, which idealizes the principle that assessment design should be driven by a single assessment purpose. With a particular focus on achievement assessments, the present article questions the tenability of purpose purism,…

The purpose of this ITEMS module is to provide an introduction to differential item functioning (DIF) analysis using mixture item response models. The mixture item response models for DIF analysis involve comparing item profiles across latent groups, instead of manifest groups. First, an overview of DIF analysis based on latent groups, called…

The alignment between a test and the content domain it measures represents key evidence for the validation of test score inferences. Although procedures have been developed for evaluating the content alignment of linear tests, these procedures are not readily applicable to computerized adaptive tests (CATs), which require large item pools and do…

Internationally, many assessment systems rely predominantly on human raters to score examinations. Arguably, this facilitates the assessment of multiple sophisticated educational constructs, strengthening assessment validity. It can introduce subjectivity into the scoring process, however, engendering threats to accuracy. The present objectives…

Local assessment systems are being marketed as formative, benchmark, predictive, and a host of other terms. Many so-called formative assessments are not at all similar to the types of assessments and strategies studied by Black and Wiliam (1998) but instead are interim assessments. In this article, we clarify the definition and uses of interim…

Based on the results of a generalizability study of measures of teacher knowledge for teaching mathematics developed at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at the University of California, Los Angeles, this article provides evidence that teachers are better at drawing reasonable inferences about student…

Assessments labeled as formative have been offered as a means to improve student achievement. But labels can be a powerful way to miscommunicate. For an assessment use to be appropriately labeled "formative," both empirical evidence and reasoned arguments must be offered to support the claim that improvements in student achievement can be linked…