The 1990 Standards for Teacher Competence in Educational Assessment of Students (AFT, NCME, & NEA, 1990) made a documentable contribution to the field. However, the Standards have become a bit dated, most notably in two ways: (1) the Standards do not consider current conceptions of formative assessment knowledge and skills, and (2) the Standards…

Contemporary educational accountability systems, including state-level systems prescribed under No Child Left Behind as well as those envisioned under the "Race to the Top" comprehensive assessment competition, rely on school-level summaries of student test scores. The precision of these score summaries is almost always evaluated using models that…

Large-scale assessment results for schools, school boards/districts, and entire provinces or states are commonly reported as the percentage of students achieving a standard--that is, the percentage of students scoring above the cut score that defines the standard on the assessment scale. Recent research has shown that this method of reporting is…

Over the past few decades, those who take tests in the United States have exhibited increasing diversity with respect to native language. Standard psychometric procedures for ensuring item and test fairness that have existed for some time were developed when test-taking groups were predominantly native English speakers. A better understanding of…

This paper illustrates that the psychometric properties of scores and scales that are used with mixed-format educational tests can impact the use and interpretation of the scores that are reported to examinees. Psychometric properties that include reliability and conditional standard errors of measurement are considered in this paper. The focus is…

Standards-based reform, as codified by the No Child Left Behind Act, relies on the ability of assessments to accurately reflect the learning that takes place in U.S. classrooms. However, this property of assessments--their instructional sensitivity--is rarely, if ever, investigated by test developers, states, or researchers. In this paper, the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the connotation of performance labels used in standard setting. For example, do the performance labels "basic," "proficient," and "advanced" hold different connotations than "limited knowledge," "satisfactory," and "distinguished"? If these terms hold different connotations, such differences may play a…

"Scaling" is the process of constructing a score scale that associates numbers or other ordered indicators with the performance of examinees. Scaling typically is conducted to aid users in interpreting test results. This module describes different types of raw scores and scale scores, illustrates how to incorporate various sources of information…

In large-scale assessments, such as state-wide testing programs, national sample-based assessments, and international comparative studies, there are many steps involved in the measurement and reporting of student achievement. There are always sources of inaccuracies in each of the steps. It is of interest to identify the source and magnitude of…

Standard-setting studies utilizing procedures such as the Bookmark or Angoff methods are just one component of the complete standard-setting process. Decision makers ultimately must determine what they believe to be the most appropriate standard or cut score to use, employing the input of the standard-setting panelists as one piece of information…

This article describes an alignment study conducted to evaluate the alignment between Indiana's Kindergarten content standards and items on the Indiana Standards Tool for Alternate Reporting. Alignment is the extent to which standards and assessments are in agreement, working together to guide educators' efforts to support children's learning and…

Drawing on experience between 2000 and 2007 in developing a validity argument for the high-stakes Test of English as a "Foreign Language[TM]" (TOEFL[R]), this paper evaluates the differences between the argument-based approach to validity as presented by "Kane (2006)" and that described in the 1999 "AERA/APA/NCME Standards for Educational and…

Some writers in the measurement literature have been skeptical of the meaningfulness of achievement standards and described the standard-setting process as blatantly arbitrary. We argue that standard setting is more appropriately conceived of as a measurement process similar to student assessment. The construct being measured is the panelists'…

The analysis of longitudinal data in education is becoming more prevalent given the nature of testing systems constructed for No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). However, constructing the longitudinal data files remains a significant challenge. Students move into new schools, but in many cases the unique identifiers (ID) that should remain constant…

This paper demonstrates and discusses the use of think aloud protocols (TAPs) as an approach for examining and confirming sources of differential item functioning (DIF). The TAPs are used to investigate to what extent surface characteristics of the items that are identified by expert reviews as sources of DIF are supported by empirical evidence…