COVID-19 is disrupting assessment practices and accelerating changes. With special focus on K-12 and credentialing exams, this article describes the series of changes observed during the pandemic, the solutions assessment providers have implemented, and the long-term impact on future practices. Additionally, this article highlights the importance…

The community of educational measurement researchers and practitioners has made many positive contributions to education, but has also become complacent and lost the public trust. In this article, reasons for the lack of public trust in educational testing are described, and core values for educational measurement are proposed. Reasons for…

This article is a written version of the Presidential Address I gave at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in April 2017. It is a call to NCME members (and others who read this, of course) to rebalance their focus so that classroom assessments are seen as being at least as important as large-scale…

The Presidential Address at the 1986 National Council on Measurement in Education Annual Meeting argues that measurement specialists have tended to set unrealistic aspirations for the role tests play. The conjunctive decision making model is discussed and the use of data in the conjunctive and compensatory decision making models is examined. (JAZ)

This is an introductory comment by the organizer of the 1986 symposium of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). The symposium was organized as a memorial to the late Roger Lennon, former president of NCME and a scholar in the field of educational measurement. (JAZ)

The author describes the evolution of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). He describes some of the contributions to educational research made by inquiries based on the SAT and gives particular attention to the way scaling and equating procedures for the SAT have evolved over the last half century. (Author/JAZ)

Tracing the development of the Otis test series, the author argues that there will be a continuing demand for group-administered general mental ability tests in education. He foresees a need for better ways of relating ability test scores with skills and achievements to make them more educationally useful. (Author/JAZ)

Though the most widely used "Intelligence" tests have changed little in the last half century, the author predicts a variety of new influences of future intelligence testing, ranging from the ways we conceptualize intelligence, to the manner in which we pose problems to assess it. (Author/JAZ)

Since the 1970s, policymakers have learned that test results can be used as an administrative mechanism to implement policy. A national system of external certification tests would involve several problems: (1) absence of independent examination boards; (2) negative impact on teaching; (3) tendency to elitism; (4) competition for RFP's; and (5)…

Grade equivalent (GE) scores for elementary school achievement tests are defended in response to efforts to ban their use. Equal interval developmental scoring methods for the Sequential Tests of Educational Progress and the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills are criticized. (BS)

Technical problems in the assessment of learning disabilities (LD) are only a small part of the problems leading to the misidentification of children in this category of handicap. Given all the other motives and purposes served by labeling a child LD in school, apparently sound measurement advice may actually do more harm than good. (LC)

Gender-related differential item functioning (DIF) was examined in a context in which 3,946 middle school students received mathematics instruction focusing on problem solving. Reasons why four tasks on the performance assessment favored female students and two favored male students are discussed. (SLD)

The accuracy of statistics based on performance assessments that represent percentages of students reaching standards is explored using data from a large-scale performance assessment, the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program. Results with students in grades 3, 5, and 8 support the accuracy of pooling results to produce the statistics.…

The concept of consequential validity wrongly links the idea of the consequences of test use with the idea of validity, widely held to be rooted in the accuracy of inferences drawn from examinees' test performances. The reification of consequential validity can distract from a needed clarity about test use consequences. (SLD)

Describes an approach to addressing issues of validity of inferences and the extrapolation of inferences to target domains beyond the assessment for alternative assessments. Makes the case that in both language testing and educational assessment the roles of language and content knowledge must be considered, and that the design and development of…