In many performance assessments, one or two raters from the complete rater pool scores each performance, resulting in a sparse rating design, where there are limited observations of each rater relative to the complete sample of students. Although sparse rating designs can be constructed to facilitate estimation of student achievement, the…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have long embraced a path towards sustainability and engaged in supporting sustainable development. The adoption of the sustainability development goals has forced HEIs to assess how they engage with these goals and how they address societal challenges head on. However, the emergence of sustainability rankings…

This brief summarizes "Comparability in Balanced Assessment Systems for State Accountability," published in "Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice" (Evans & Lyons 2017). The study evaluated comparability claims in local scoring of performance assessments across districts participating in New Hampshire's Performance…

Self-report is currently used as an indicator of professional practice in a variety of fields, including medicine and education. Important to consider, therefore, is the ability of self-report to accurately capture professional practice. This study investigated how well professionals' self-reports of behavior agreed with an expert observer's…

Growing reliance on complex constructed response items has generated considerable interest in automated scoring solutions. Many of these solutions are described in the literature; however, relatively few studies have been published that "compare" automated scoring strategies. Here, comparisons are made among five strategies for…

After passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, states assumed greater responsibility for designing their own accountability and assessment systems. ESSA requires states to measure "higher order thinking skills and understanding" and encourages the use of open-ended performance assessments, which are essential for…

In the United Kingdom, the majority of national assessments involve human raters. The processes by which raters determine the scores to award are central to the assessment process and affect the extent to which valid inferences can be made from assessment outcomes. Thus, understanding rater cognition has become a growing area of research in the…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new possibilities for how student and school success are defined and supported in American public education. States have greater responsibility for designing and building their assessment and accountability systems. These new opportunities to develop performance assessments are critically important…

Background: Many in education argue for the importance of incorporating teacher judgements in the assessment and reporting of student performance. Advocates of such an approach are cognisant, though, that obtaining a satisfactory level of consistency in teacher judgements poses a challenge. Purpose: This study investigates the extent to which the…

Collaborative testing has been shown to improve performance but not always content retention. In this study, we investigated whether collaborative testing could improve both performance and content retention in a large, introductory biology course. Students were semirandomly divided into two groups based on their performances on exam 1. Each group…

Assessment of complex task performance is crucial to evaluating personnel in critical job functions such as Navy damage control operations aboard ships. Games and simulations can be instrumental in this process, as they can present a broad range of complex scenarios without involving harm to people or property. However, "automatic"…

This article is based on the perceptions of California State University administrators and provides a comparative study of the challenges and benefits resulting from the implementation of the teaching performance assessment requirement of SB 2042 standards 19-21 on the California State University (CSU) campuses. With 23 campuses and almost 450,000…

This study was designed to investigate several scoring modalities in terms of the accuracy of scores and the efficiency of scoring procedures. Five scoring modalities (SM) are conceptualized by considering tasks and raters as sources of error where "p,""t," and "r" represent person, task, and rater, respectively.…

Research on automated scoring is extended by comparing alternative automated systems for scoring a computer simulation of physicians' patient management skills. A regression-based system is more highly correlated with experts' evaluations than a system that uses complex rules to map performances into score levels, but both approaches are feasible.…

Comparative results are presented for procedures recently appearing in literature related to standard setting on the National Assessment of Educational Progress--the paper selection method and the contrasting group method. For this comparison, a probabilistic model with normal distribution of performance and a six-point scale were assumed. The…