Educational assessment involves eliciting, transmitting, and receiving information concerning the level of proficiency of a learner in a specified domain. With that in mind, it is perhaps surprising that the literature seems to make very little use of the signal processing metaphor. The present article begins by making a general case for greater…

One of the primary themes of the National Research Council's 2001 book "Knowing What Students Know" was the importance of cognition as a component of assessment design and measurement theory (NRC, 2001). One reaction to the book has been an increased use of sophisticated statistical methods to model cognitive information available in test data.…

There are many threats to validity in high-stakes achievement testing. One major threat is construct-irrelevant variance (CIV). This article defines CIV in the context of the contemporary, unitary view of validity and presents logical arguments, hypotheses, and documentation for a variety of CIV sources that commonly threaten interpretations of…

The relationships between ratings on the Idaho Alternate Assessment (IAA) for 116 students with significant disabilities and corresponding ratings for the same students on two norm-referenced teacher rating scales were examined to gain evidence about the validity of resulting IAA scores. To contextualize these findings, another group of 54…

If curriculum is to be the basis for assessment reform, assessment specialists must model the process for producing valid assessment products. Validity criteria should guide any model for the assessment development process. However, curriculum-based assessment systems should not be confused with standards-driven assessment systems. (SLD)

Practices identified by experts as critical variables in eliciting writing samples were checked against 12 randomly selected studies using holistic ratings to derive descriptions of inferential statistical results for described samples. The studies often lacked precise information about these variables, limiting understanding of writing evaluation…