Teachers need ways to efficiently assess students' cognitive understanding. One promising approach involves easily adapted and administered item types that yield quantitative scores that can be interpreted in terms of whether or not students likely possess key understandings. This study illustrates an approach to analyzing response process…

There is a need for assessment items that assess complex constructs but can also be efficiently scored for evaluation of teacher education programs. In an effort to measure the construct of teacher attentiveness in an efficient and scalable manner, we are using exemplar responses elicited by constructed-response item prompts to develop…

The "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" recommend an argument-based approach to validation that involves a clear statement of the intended interpretation and use of test scores, the identification of the underlying assumptions and inferences in that statement--termed the interpretation/use argument, and gathering of…

Traditional psychometric guidelines suggest that at least several hundred respondents are needed to obtain accurate parameter estimates under the Rasch model. However, recent research indicates that Rasch equating results in accurate parameter estimates with sample sizes as small as 25. Item parameter drift under the Rasch model has been…

When we administer educational achievement tests, we want to be confident that the resulting scores validly indicate what the test takers know and can do. However, if the test is perceived as low stakes by the test taker, disengaged test taking sometimes occurs, which poses a serious threat to score validity. When computer-based tests are used,…

Whenever the purpose of measurement is to inform an inference about a student's achievement level, it is important that we be able to trust that the student's test score accurately reflects what that student knows and can do. Such trust requires the assumption that a student's test event is not unduly influenced by construct-irrelevant factors…

The assessment of noncognitive traits is challenging due to possible response biases, "subjectivity" and "faking." Standardized third-party evaluations where an external evaluator rates an applicant on their strengths and weaknesses on various noncognitive traits are a promising alternative. However, accurate score-based…

This study utilizes an argument-based approach to validation to examine the implications of reliability in order to further differentiate the concepts of score and decision consistency. In a methodological example, the framework of generalizability theory was used to estimate appropriate indices of score consistency and evaluations of the…

Possible lack of motivation is a perpetual concern when tests have no stakes attached to performance. Specifically, the validity of test score interpretations may be compromised when examinees are unmotivated to exert their best efforts. Motivation filtering, a procedure that filters out apparently unmotivated examinees, was applied to the…

Correlational evidence suggests that high school GPA is better than admission test scores in predicting first-year college GPA, although test scores have incremental predictive validity. The usefulness of a selection variable in making admission decisions depends in part on its predictive validity, but also on institutions' selectivity and…

The purpose of the study was to measure students' reported test-taking effort and the relationship between reported effort and performance on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) Advanced mathematics test. This was done in three countries participating in TIMSS Advanced 2008 (Sweden, Norway, and Slovenia), and the…

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…

The articles in this special issue make two important contributions to our understanding of the impact of accommodations on test score validity. First, they illustrate a variety of methods for collection and rigorous analyses of empirical data that can supplant expert judgment of the impact of accommodations. These methods range from internal…

Although reliability of subscale scores may be suspect, subscale scores are the most common type of diagnostic information included in student score reports. This research compared methods for augmenting the reliability of subscale scores for an 8th-grade mathematics assessment. Yen's Objective Performance Index, Wainer et al.'s augmented scores,…

Glossary and reading aloud test items are commonly allowed in many states' accommodation policies for English language learner (ELL) students for large-scale mathematics assessments. However, little research is available regarding the effects of these accommodations on ELL students' performance. Further, no research exists that examines how…