The author provides information about reliability and areas that educators should examine in determining if an assessment is consistent and trustworthy for use, and how it should be interpreted in making decisions about students. Reliability areas that are discussed in the column include internal consistency, test-retest or stability, inter-scorer…

Transparency is once again a central issue of debate across types of qualitative research. Work on how to conduct qualitative data analysis, on the other hand, walks us through the step-by-step process on how to code and understand the data we've collected. Although there are a few exceptions, less focus is on transparency regarding…

This paper describes a process to define a comprehensive list of exemplars for seven core Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and report on interrater reliability in applying these exemplars to determine ASD case classification. Clinicians completed an iterative process to map specific…

Cohen's kappa coefficient was originally proposed for two raters only, and it later extended to an arbitrarily large number of raters to become what is known as Fleiss' generalized kappa. Fleiss' generalized kappa and its large-sample variance are still widely used by researchers and were implemented in several software packages, including, among…

In this collective essay the authors consider the nature and consequences of reading and researching across difference in an international and intergenerational team, whose core members are focused on understanding how curriculum operates and the nature of textbook representation of diversity in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau.…

This document describes a set of best practices for developing, implementing, and maintaining the critical process of scoring constructed-response tasks. These practices address both the use of human raters and automated scoring systems as part of the scoring process and cover the scoring of written, spoken, performance, or multimodal responses.…

In this article, the authors share their reflections on how different experiences and paradigms have broadened their understanding of the work of assessment in higher education. As they collaborated to create a panel for the 2024 International Conference on Assessing Quality in Higher Education, they recognized that they, as assessment…

Practitioners often struggle to assess reflective learning in the workplace because of difficulties conceptualizing reflection and its effects in the workplace. This article addresses this problem by offering a pragmatic approach to assessment that asks practitioners to specify why they are using reflection, what they are hoping to gain from it,…

The same L2 speaking performance may be analysed and evaluated in very different ways by different teachers or raters. We present a new, technology-assisted research design which opens up to investigation the trajectories of convergence and divergence between raters. We tracked and recorded what different raters noticed when, whilst grading a…

Rater-mediated assessments are a common methodology for measuring persons, investigating rater behavior, and/or defining latent constructs. The purpose of this article is to provide a pedagogical framework for examining rater variability in the context of rater-mediated assessments using three distinct models. The first model is the observation…

Rater-mediated assessments require the evaluation of the accuracy and consistency of the inferences made by the raters to ensure the validity of score interpretations and uses. Modeling rater response processes allows for a better understanding of how raters map their representations of the examinee performance to their representation of the…

In this digital ITEMS module, Dr. Jacqueline Leighton and Dr. Blair Lehman review differences between think-aloud interviews to measure problem-solving processes and cognitive labs to measure comprehension processes. Learners are introduced to historical, theoretical, and procedural differences between these methods and how to use and analyze…

Appropriate interpretation of assessment data requires an appreciation that tools are subject to measurement error. School psychologists recognize, at least on an intellectual level, that measures are imperfect--that test scores and other quantitative measures (e.g., rating scales, systematic behavioral observations) are best estimates of…

This paper discusses the challenges and lessons learned from conducting observations to measure the quality of classroom practice for a large-scale study of elementary teachers' mathematics instruction. Specifically, this paper shares our process for obtaining valid data for quality of elementary mathematics instruction; what we learned can inform…

Teachers need to assess their students' current level of mathematical understanding to provide appropriate interventions for students who are struggling. Several school districts in Georgia currently use two assessments for this purpose--the Global Strategy Stage (GloSS) and the Individual Knowledge Assessment of Number (IKAN). The IKAN is…