Inspired by the recent 21st century social and educational movements toward equity, diversity, and inclusion for disadvantaged groups, educational researchers have sought in conceptualizing fairness in classroom assessment contexts. These efforts have provoked promising key theoretical foundations and empirical investigations to examine fairness…

This report summarizes an investigation of literature published in 1985-2023 on universal design (UD) of large-scale assessments. State education agencies, K-12 assessment vendors, teacher trainers, and classroom teachers are increasingly applying the principles of UD to the instruction and assessment of students from special populations. In…

Studies have confirmed that fair assessment practices in educational contexts affect learners' motivation, self-regulation, and above all teacher credibility, yet the concept has been subject to educational stakeholders' diverse outlooks and perspectives. On this basis, this study delves into the high school English as Foreign Language (EFL)…

Recent criticisms of large-scale summative assessments have claimed that the assessments are biased against historically excluded groups because of the assessments' lack of cultural representation. Accompanying these criticisms is a call for more culturally responsive assessments--assessments that take into account the background characteristics…

Most assessments adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to provide fair testing opportunities to all learners. However, this rigid approach to assessment may limit the ability for some learners to show what they know and can do. The Caring Assessments framework proposed a guide for the design and development of flexible, personalized, and adaptive…

Practical constraints in rater-mediated assessments limit the availability of complete data. Instead, most scoring procedures include one or two ratings for each performance, with overlapping performances across raters or linking sets of multiple-choice items to facilitate model estimation. These incomplete scoring designs present challenges for…

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, Two-Spirit, and other sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ+) individuals encounter numerous obstacles to equity across health and healthcare, education, housing, employment, and other domains. Such barriers are even greater for LGBTQ+ individuals who are also Black, Indigenous, and People of Color…

The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on education, forcing many teachers and students who were not used to online education to adapt to an unanticipated reality by improvising new teaching and learning methods. Within the realm of virtual education, the evaluation methods underwent a transformation, with some assessments shifting towards…

How do teachers develop their understanding of the foundation principles of assessment, stay up to date with the latest classroom approaches and have the confidence to evaluate and question the effectiveness of new methods? This professional resource for teachers supports them to understand the what, why and how of assessment. It provides key…

Fairness in assessment has become increasingly topical and controversial in recent years. Assessment theoreticians are writing more about fairness and assessment practitioners have developed processes and good practice to minimise unfairness. There is also increased scrutiny by students, parents and the wider public--not only of the fairness of…

Validity, reliability, and fairness are three prominent indicators for evaluating the quality of assessment processes. Each of the indicators is most often written about and applied in the context of large-scale assessment. As a result, the technical properties of these indicators make them limited in both their practicality and relevance for…

The MAP® Growth™ theory of action describes key features of MAP Growth and its position in a comprehensive assessment system. The basic premise of the theory of action is that all students learn when MAP Growth is situated in a comprehensive assessment system and used for its intended purposes to yield information about student learning and enable…

The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) broadened the educational landscape by providing free access to quality learning materials for anyone with a device connected to the Internet. However, open access does not guarantee equals opportunities to learn, and research has repetitively reported that learners from affluent countries…

We investigated the potential impact of differential item functioning (DIF) on group-level mean and standard deviation estimates using empirical and simulated data in the context of large-scale assessment. For the empirical investigation, PISA 2018 cognitive domains (Reading, Mathematics, and Science) data were analyzed using Jackknife sampling to…

Juries are a high-stake practice in higher education to assess complex competencies. However common, research remains behind in detailing the psychometric qualities of juries, especially when using rubrics or rating scales as an assessment tool. In this study, I analyze a case of a jury assessment (N = 191) of product development where both…