The onset of the coronavirus pandemic forced schools and universities across the nation and world to close and move to distance learning rather immediately. Almost two years later, colleges and universities have reopened, and most students have returned to campuses, but distance learning still occurs at a much higher rate than before the beginning…

Hong Kong was one of the first places hit with the COVID-19 outbreak in January 2020 and has since responded with several periods of full or partial school suspension, during which teaching and learning often occurred remotely using digital means. During this time, collecting research data and testing students have become more difficult than…

Educational assessment involves eliciting, transmitting, and receiving information concerning the level of proficiency of a learner in a specified domain. With that in mind, it is perhaps surprising that the literature seems to make very little use of the signal processing metaphor. The present article begins by making a general case for greater…

Educational tests are standardized so that all examinees are tested on the same material, under the same testing conditions, and with the same scoring protocols. This uniformity is designed to provide a level "playing field" for all examinees so that the test is "the same" for everyone. Thus, standardization is designed to…

Three examples of extant testing practices (i.e., a classroom instructor's use of a simple pre-post design, the practice of teaching to the test, and the think aloud verbal protocol) are discussed to illustrate the contention that assessment in the service of testing and learning does not necessarily involve radically different assessment…

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…

We explored the feasibility of using automated scoring to assess upper-elementary students' reading ability through analysis of transcripts of students' small-group discussions about texts. Participants included 35 fourth-grade students across two classrooms that engaged in a literacy intervention called Quality Talk. During the course of one…

Items on test score scales located at and below the Proficient cut score define the content area knowledge and skills required to achieve proficiency. Alternately, examinees who perform at the Proficient level on a test can be expected to be able to demonstrate that they have mastered most of the knowledge and skills represented by the items at…

Students who are deaf or hard of hearing (SDHH) often use test accommodations when they participate in large-scale, standardized assessments. The purpose of this article is to present findings from the "Third Annual Survey of Assessment and Accommodations for Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing". The "big five" accommodations were reported by…

Large data sets from a state reading assessment for third and fifth graders were analyzed to examine differential item functioning (DIF), differential distractor functioning (DDF), and differential omission frequency (DOF) between students with particular categories of disabilities (speech/language impairments, learning disabilities, and emotional…

An effect size of about 0.70 (or 0.40-0.70) is often claimed for the efficacy of formative assessment, but is not supported by the existing research base. More than 300 studies that appeared to address the efficacy of formative assessment in grades K-12 were reviewed. Many of the studies had severely flawed research designs yielding…

Many educational testing programs report examinee performance at more than two levels of proficiency. Whether these assessments have the capacity to support these multiple inferences, though, is a topic that has not been widely discussed. This study proposes a method for evaluating the minimum number of measurement opportunities for reporting…

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…

The relationships between ratings on the Idaho Alternate Assessment (IAA) for 116 students with significant disabilities and corresponding ratings for the same students on two norm-referenced teacher rating scales were examined to gain evidence about the validity of resulting IAA scores. To contextualize these findings, another group of 54…

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…