The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) serves over 19 million primary, middle, and high school students from across 26 states and affiliates (Smarter Balanced, n.d). As one of the two Race to the Top (RTT)-funded assessment consortia, Smarter Balanced is responsible for developing formative, interim, and summative assessments for students in grades 3-8 and 11. The assessments are intended to measure English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. In addition to being computer-administered, the summative assessments will be computer-adaptive and will incorporate technology enhancements in the test format. Smarter Balanced is addressing the needs of English language learners (ELLs) throughout the test development process. Central to the test development process are the principles of universal design, research-based decision-making processes, and implementing innovative practices. New research can assist states and consortia as they work toward the creation of next generation assessment systems. Smarter Balanced pilot test development procedures provide an opportunity to examine the feasibility and challenges associated with suggestions included in this special issue. Two important questions are addressed: How can current research be incorporated into current test development practices? and What additional research is necessary to improve current test development practices? In this article Magda Chia explores how each of this issue's five articles address these important aspects of testing ELLs. She concludes that as consortia develop assessments, they have an opportunity to use the latest available research and share results to move the field forward in the most critical directions. As a result, consortia can disseminate information to vendors, state assessment experts, psychometricians, language acquisition experts, and policymakers. Smarter Balanced disseminated materials to state assessment departments, policymakers, and educators. In addition, members of the test development and test administration fields are incorporating information provided by experts as part of their work moving forward. Finally, to ensure a substantial improvement in testing practices for ELLs, current research and lessons learned from its application in test development efforts should be extensively disseminated to stakeholder groups.