After passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, states assumed greater responsibility for designing their own accountability and assessment systems. ESSA requires states to measure "higher order thinking skills and understanding" and encourages the use of open-ended performance assessments, which are essential for measuring these skills. The report from which this brief is drawn, which was commissioned by the Council of Chief State School Officers, reviews four models for large-scale assessment systems that include performance-based components and references research in the U.S. and abroad showing how states can design and score these assessments with high levels of comparability and reliability. [For the full report, see ED606777.]