The article describes practical suggestions for measurement researchers and psychometricians to respond to calls for social responsibility in assessment. The underlying assumption is that personalizing large-scale assessment improves the chances that assessment and the use of test scores will contribute to equity in education. This article…

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…

The goal in personalized assessment is to best fit the needs of each individual test taker, given the assessment purposes. Design-in-Real-Time (DIRTy) assessment reflects the progressive evolution in testing from a single test, to an adaptive test, to an adaptive assessment "system." In this article, we lay the foundation for DIRTy…

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…

Mokken scale analysis (MSA) is a probabilistic-nonparametric approach to item response theory (IRT) that can be used to evaluate fundamental measurement properties with less strict assumptions than parametric IRT models. This instructional module provides an introduction to MSA as a probabilistic-nonparametric framework in which to explore…

A particular trait of the educational system under socialist reign was accountability at the input side--appropriate facilities, centrally decided curriculum, approved text-books, and uniformly trained teachers--but no control on the output. It was simply assumed that it met the agreed standards, which was, in turn, proven by the statistics…

This article describes an alignment procedure, called Links for Academic Learning (LAL), for examining the degree of alignment of alternate assessments based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS) to grade-level content standards and instruction. Although some of the alignment criteria are similar to those used in general education…

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…

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…

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…

In many school districts, the pressure to raise test scores has created overnight celebrity status for formative assessment. Its powers to raise student achievement have been touted, however, without attending to the research on which these claims were based. Sociocultural learning theory provides theoretical grounding for understanding how…

The book reviewed is a compendium of current thinking about measurement theory and test use. It includes content by 26 authors at 3 levels: (1) accessible to educators, policy makers, and graduate students; (2) suited for technical students; and (3) written for qualified measurement specialists. Strengths and weaknesses are noted. (SLD)

The Internet is a large and growing resource for those interested in educational assessment issues. Internet resources of particular interest to the assessment community are identified and discussed. These include gopher sites, Web sites, and listservs. (SLD)