Cognitive Diagnosis Models (CDMs) are a special family of discrete latent variable models that are widely used in educational and psychological measurement. A key component of CDMs is the Q-matrix characterizing the dependence structure between the items and the latent attributes. Additionally, researchers also assume in many applications certain…

Critical thinking is one of the most important skills deemed necessary for college graduates to become effective contributors in the global workforce. The first part of this article provides a comprehensive review of its definitions by major frameworks in higher education and the workforce, existing assessments and their psychometric qualities,…

The idea that assessment is intrinsic to effective instruction is traced from early experiments in the individualization of learning through the work of Benjamin Bloom to reviews of the impact of feedback on learners in classrooms. While many of these reviews detailed the adverse impact of assessment on learning, they also indicated that under…

Whilst many definitions of formative assessment have been offered, there is no clear rationale to define and delimit it within broader theories of pedagogy. This paper aims to offer such a rationale, within a framework which can also unify the diverse set of practices which have been described as formative. The analysis is used to relate formative…

The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate one iterate of a process for developing a measurement instrument for student knowledge within educational interventions. Student mathematical knowledge is framed within Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) and its tenets. That is, the construct underlying the measurement instrument corresponded…

Much of the argument about comparability of examination standards is at cross-purposes; contradictory positions are in fact often both defensible, but they are using the same words to mean different things. To clarify this, two broad conceptualisations of standards can be identified. One sees the standard in the observed phenomena of performance…

Paul Newton (2010), with his characteristic concern about theory, has set out two different ways of thinking about the basis upon which equivalences of one sort or another are established between test score scales. His reason for doing this is a desire to establish "the defensibility of linkages lower on the continuum than concordance."…

Diagnostic assessment is currently an active research area in educational measurement. Literature related to diagnostic modeling has been in existence for several decades, but a great deal of research has been conducted within the last decade or so, especially within the last five years. The author summarizes the key components in the application…

This article presents the author's rejoinder to thinking about linking from issue 8(1). Particularly within the more embracing linking frameworks, e.g., Holland & Dorans (2006) and Holland (2007), there appears to be a major disjunction between (1) classification discourse: the supposed basis for classification, that is, the underlying theory…

"Linking" is a term given to a general class of procedures by which one represents scores X on one test or measure in terms of scores Y on another test or measure. A recent taxonomy by Holland and Dorans (2006; Holland, 2007) organizes the various types of links into three broad categories: prediction, scale aligning, and equating. In…

Robert Coe has claimed that three broad conceptions of comparability can be identified from the literature: performance, statistical and conventional. Each of these he rejected, in favour of a single, integrated conception which relies upon the notion of a "linking construct" and which he termed "construct comparability".…

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…

Newton's article (2010) makes three main contributions to the literature. First, it is transatlantic, bringing together literatures that have been dealing with similar problems, using sometimes different methods and certainly with distinctive educational, cultural perspectives. He points out that neither of these literatures has all of the…

The article "Thinking About Linking" by Newton (2010) presents a novel philosophical perspective on the way that educational assessments should be linked. Newton starts by describing the linking framework as it was characterized in various publications and identifies a cross-cultural dimension in the definitions and uses of test…

"Diagnostic classification models" (DCM) are frequently promoted by psychometricians as important modelling alternatives for analyzing response data in situations where multivariate classifications of respondents are made on the basis of multiple postulated latent skills. In this review paper, a definitional boundary of the space of DCM…