Evidence-centered design (ECD) is an orientation towards assessment development. It differs from conventional practice in several ways and consists of multiple activities. Each of these activities results in a set of useful documentation: domain analysis, domain modeling, construction of the assessment framework, and assessment…

The cornerstone of evidence-centered assessment design (ECD) is an evidentiary argument that requires that each target of measurement (e.g., learning goal) for an assessment be expressed as a "claim" to be made about an examinee that is relevant to the specific purpose and audience(s) for the assessment. The "observable evidence" required to…

Developing a cognitive model of task performance is an important and often overlooked phase in assessment design; failing to establish such a model can threaten the validity of the inferences made from the scores produced by an assessment (e.g., Leighton, 2004). Conducting think aloud interviews (TAIs), where students think aloud while completing…

Presented at the Annual Meeting of National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in San Diego, CA in April 2009. This presentation provides an overview of ECD. In addition, the presentation describes the benefits of, as well as the challenges that were faced, in implementing ECD in the Advanced Placement Program.

Evidence-centered assessment design (ECD) explicates a transparent evidentiary argument to warrant the inferences we make from student test performance. This article describes how the vehicles for gathering student evidence--task models and test specifications--are developed. Task models, which are the basis for item development, flow directly…

In many large-scale assessment programs, achievement level descriptors (ALDs) provide a critical role in communicating what scores on the assessment mean and in interpreting what examinees know and are able to do based on their test performance. Based on their test performance, examinees are often classified into performance categories. The…