In 2019, Drew H. Gitomer, Dan Battey, and José Felipe Martínez published a paper detailing apparent violations of fundamental principles and norms in the reporting of technical information about the edTPA, a widely used high-stakes assessment for teacher licensure. In this article, they describe and criticize the lack of appropriate response to…

In 2014 the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation replacing end-of-course, multiple-choice assessments with locally developed alternative assessments in five courses, including two middle school social studies courses. This policy allowed Virginia school divisions the autonomy to develop the format, quantity, and focus of their assessments…

The requirement for all Initial Teacher Education programs in Australia to include a capstone teacher performance assessment (TPA) is relatively new. However, TPAs are common in other countries, particularly the United States. In this article, we report on a review of the literature instigated by the authors' involvement in the development of an…

Purpose: Scholars who advocate for equity-oriented educational practices have argued that the accountability era in the USA, now in place for two decades, has failed in its intended goal to improve student performance for traditionally marginalized student populations. This study aims to use a sociocultural lens to trace how a century-old…

While the viva voce (oral) examination has always been used in content-based educational assessment (Latham 1877: 132), the assessment of second language (L2) speaking in performance tests is relatively recent. The impetus for the growth in testing speaking during the 19th and 20th centuries is twofold. Firstly, in educational settings the…

In the United States, colleges of education are responding to demands for increased accountability. The purpose of this article is to describe one teacher education program's implementation of a performance evaluation tool during final internship that measures teacher candidates' development across four domains: Planning and Preparation,…

A primary difficulty with music performance assessment is managing its subjective nature. To help improve objectivity, rubrics can be used to develop a set of guidelines for clearly assessing student performance. Moreover, rubrics serve as documentation for student achievement that provides music teachers with a written form of accountability.…

This handbook is designed as a quick reference for first-year teachers who find themselves in an assessment driven environment with little experience to help make sense of the language, underlying philosophy, or organizational structure of the assessment system. The handbook begins with advice on developing and evaluating effective learning…

"Classroom Assessment in Action" clarifies the multi-faceted roles of measurement and assessment and their applications in a classroom setting. Comprehensive in scope, Shermis and Di Vesta explain basic measurement concepts and show students how to interpret the results of standardized tests. From these basic concepts, the authors then…

In 1996, a subcommittee of the State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards commissioned a study of the use of performance-based assessments in large-scale accountability systems. The idea was to look into current state assessment work on performance-based assessments to see what has been learned, but not widely reported, by those who…

This brief suggests that performance accountability offers the chance to refocus on what learners accomplish by participating in adult basic education (ABE) and to reorient every aspect of the system to achieve the best results. The 1966 Adult Education Act provides little guidance in developing performance accountability. Recent research…

The idea that validity should be considered a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, has developed slowly over the past century. In early writings about the validity of educational assessments, validity was defined as a property of an assessment. The most common definition was that an assessment was valid to the extent that it…

A crucial, but often forgotten, role of educational assessment is to enhance students' learning. This author advocates that an assessment program designed for student learning differs from assessment for accountability in purpose, test format, measurement type, number, and spread of tests, use of test results, and amount of interval between…

This paper synthesizes information derived from five sources regarding issues in testing as they related to the American 2000; an education strategy and the national education goals. The focus is on proposed national tests. The issue of national testing extends far beyond testing itself because it touches on the structure of the U.S. educational…

Performance based assessment refers to tasks that require students to construct responses or take actions to demonstrate specific knowledge or skills. Performance assessment tasks appear in a variety of formats, but they focus on higher order skills and are nonroutine, and sometimes loosely structured, in nature. A number of concerns have been…