This article characterizes the advances, opportunities, and challenges for psychometrics of simulation-based assessments through a lens that views assessment as evidentiary reasoning. Simulation-based tasks offer the prospect for student experiences that differ from traditional assessment. Such tasks may be used to support evidentiary arguments…

Guided by evidence that teachers contribute to student achievement outcomes, researchers have been reexamining how to study instruction and the classroom opportunities teachers create for students. We describe our experience measuring students' opportunities to develop analytic, text-based writing skills. Utilizing multiple methods of data…

The task of validating a teacher assessment and improvement system is similar whether the system operates in the United States or in another country. Chile has a national teacher evaluation system (NTES) that is standards based, uses multiple instruments, and is intended to serve both formative and summative purposes. For the past 6 years the…

Promising research on the teaching and learning impact of classroom-embedded formative assessment has spawned interest in a broader array of assessment tools and practices, including interim assessment. Although researchers have begun to explore the impact of interim assessments in the classroom, like other assessment tools and practices, they…

This article presents a study of ethnic Differential Item Functioning (DIF) for 4th-, 7th-, and 10th-grade reading items on a state criterion-referenced achievement test. The tests, administered 1997 to 2001, were composed of multiple-choice and constructed-response items. Item performance by focal groups (i.e., students from Asian/Pacific Island,…

Students with disabilities participate in two major measurement systems. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act emphasizes working within a Response to Intervention (RTI) framework to identify and monitor the progress of low-performing students. Persistent low-performing students also may be eligible for some form of an alternate…

This article adapts the Evidence-Based Reasoning (EBR) Framework (Brown, Furtak, Timms, Nagashima, & Wilson, this issue) to create a coding system for assessing argumentation in science classroom discourse. The instrument, "Evidence-Based Reasoning in Science Classroom Discourse", is intended to provide a means for measuring the quality of EBR in…

The Evidence-Based Reasoning Assessment System (EBRAS) brings together advances in modeling scientific reasoning and assessment design to guide the development of written assessment items that target, disentangle, and elicit evidence of the multiple proficiencies underlying scientific argumentation. In this study, the EBRAS was used to assess the…

Recent science education reforms have emphasized the importance of students engaging with and reasoning from evidence to develop scientific explanations. A number of studies have created frameworks based on Toulmin's (1958/2003) argument pattern, whereas others have developed systems for assessing the quality of students' reasoning to support…

Assessment systems that track children's progress across time need to be sensitive to the variegated nature of development. Although instruments are commonly designed to assess behaviors within a specific age range, some children advance slower or faster than others and, as a result, often show behaviors from a younger or older age group. This…

Educational program assessment studies often use data from low-stakes tests to provide evidence of program quality. The validity of scores from such tests, however, is potentially threatened by examinee noneffort. This study investigated the extent to which one type of noneffort--rapid-guessing behavior--distorted the results from three types of…

The person-fit literature assumes that aberrant response patterns could be a sign of person mismeasurement, but this assumption has rarely, if ever, been empirically investigated before. We explore the validity of test responses and measures of 10-year-old examinees whose response patterns on a commercial standardized paper-and-pencil mathematics…

This study investigated whether scores obtained from the online and paper-and-pencil administrations of the statewide end-of-course English test were equivalent for students with and without disabilities. Score comparability was evaluated by examining equivalence of factor structure (measurement invariance) and differential item and bundle…

To date, assessment validity research on non-native English speaking students in the United States has focused exclusively on those who are presently English language learners (ELLs). However, little, if any, research has been conducted on two other sizable groups of language minority students: (a) bilingual or multilingual students who were…

To improve student science achievement in the United States we need inquiry-based instruction that promotes coherent understanding and assessments that are aligned with the instruction. Instead, current textbooks often offer fragmented ideas and most assessments only tap recall of details. In this study we implemented 10 inquiry-based science…