The problem that guided this study was the low proportion of students scoring 3 or more on the Advanced Placement English Language and Composition (APELC) exam at one Department of Defense (DoD) school. Moreover, the qualifying ratios were lower than students attending all DoD and U.S. schools. The need for teachers to examine the performance of…

Presented at the Annual Meeting of National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in San Diego, CA in April 2009. This presentation provides an overview of ECD. In addition, the presentation describes the benefits of, as well as the challenges that were faced, in implementing ECD in the Advanced Placement Program.

Developing a cognitive model of task performance is an important and often overlooked phase in assessment design; failing to establish such a model can threaten the validity of the inferences made from the scores produced by an assessment (e.g., Leighton, 2004). Conducting think aloud interviews (TAIs), where students think aloud while completing…

Presented at the Annual Meeting of National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in San Diego, CA in April 2009. This presentation describes the methodology that was used with subject-matter experts (SMEs) to articulate the content and skills important in the domain, and then the iterative processes that were used to articulate the claims…