Combining methods from earlier content validity and more contemporary content alignment studies may allow a more complete evaluation of the meaning of test scores than if either set of methods is used on its own. This article distinguishes item relevance indices in the content validity literature from test representativeness indices in the…

Classroom assessment research in the United States has shifted away from the examination of teacher-made tests, but such tests are still widely used and have an enormous impact on students' educational experiences. Given the major shifts in educational policy in the United States, including the widespread adoption of the Common Core State…

The choice of anchor tests is crucial in applications of the nonequivalent groups with anchor test design of equating. Sinharay and Holland (2006, 2007) suggested "miditests," which are anchor tests that are content-representative and have the same mean item difficulty as the total test but have a smaller spread of item difficulties.…

Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. The NAEP assessment in mathematics has two components that differ in purpose. One assessment measures long-term trends in achievement among 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students by using the same basic design each time.…

Educators have many decisions to make and it's important that they have the right data to inform those decisions and access to questionnaires that can gather that data. This guide, developed by REL Central and based on work done through separate projects with the Wyoming Office of Public Instruction and the Nebraska Department of Education,…

This report is an update of the assessment principles and guidelines for English language learners published in 2013 (Thurlow, Liu, Ward, & Christensen). That report, which was developed by the Improving the Validity of Assessment Results for English Language Learners with Disabilities (IVARED) project, presented essential principles of…

The primary purpose of International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) 2018 is to assess systematically the capacities of students to use ICT productively for a range of different purposes, in ways that go beyond a basic use of ICT. ICILS 2018 includes authentic computer-based assessments that are administered to students in their…

Writing multiple-choice test items to measure student learning in higher education is a challenge. Based on extensive scholarly research and experience, the author describes various item formats, offers guidelines for creating these items, and provides many examples of both good and bad test items. He also suggests some shortcuts for developing…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) measures student science achievement nationally, state by state, and, most recently, across selected urban school districts. Periodically, the framework underlying the science assessment is revised or updated. This document, "Science Framework for the 2019 National Assessment of…

As pressure builds to assess students, teachers, and schools, educational practitioners and policy makers are increasingly looking toward student perception surveys as a promising means to collect high-quality, useful data. For instance, the widely cited Measures of Effective Teaching study lists student perception surveys as one of the three key…

Assessment engineering is a new way to design and implement scalable, sustainable and ideally lower-cost solutions to the complexities of designing and developing tests. It represents a merger of sorts between cognitive task modeling and engineering design principles--a merger that requires some new thinking about the nature of score scales, item…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only continuing and nationally representative measure of trends in academic achievement of U.S. elementary and secondary school students in various subjects. For more than four decades, NAEP assessments have been conducted periodically in reading, mathematics, science, writing, U.S.…

Chemistry faculty members are highly skilled in obtaining, analyzing, and interpreting physical measurements, but often they are less skilled in measuring student learning. This work provides guidance for chemistry faculty from the research literature on multiple-choice item development in chemistry. Areas covered include content, stem, and…

In the present paper and the discussion that follows, the author presents aspects of test construction and a careful description of instructional objectives. Constructing tests involves several stages such as describing language objectives, selecting appropriate test task, devising and assembling test tasks, and devising a scoring system for…

Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. Results of these periodic assessments, produced in print and web-based formats, provide valuable information to a wide variety of audiences. They inform citizens about the nature of students' comprehension of the…