Enduring Issues in Educational Assessment

Abstract

IT IS common to look backward periodically to understand what happened, to generalize about what happens under such conditions, and to learn how to adapt to new possibilities. A quarter century after A Nation Risk appeared, various issues in assessment, the focus of some of the report's recommendations, endure. Despite its title, A Nation Risk was always intended to be a forward-looking document. Its graphically enhanced preamble reads: All, regardless of race or class or economic status, are entitled to a fair chance and to the tools for developing their individual powers of mind and spirit to the utmost. This promise means that all children by virtue virtue of their own efforts, competently guided, can hope to attain the mature and informed judgment needed to secure gainful employment, and to manage their own lives, thereby serving not only their own interests but also the progress of society itself. (1) Student assessment was regarded as one tool toward this end. The key recommendations relevant to assessment were in part a reaction to the low standards in then-current implementations of minimum competency examinations. The report called for standardized tests of achievement to be administered at major transition points between the levels of schooling in order to certify the student's credentials; identify the need for remedial intervention, and identify the opportunity for advanced or accelerated work. Moreover, the report called for a national system of state and local tests that should include other diagnostic procedures to help teachers and students evaluate student progress (p. 28). This was a modest set of recommendations for achievement tests, and much of what was called for is part of current practice. However, we now face a new set of challenges. Readers interested in a historical sketch of the developments and challenges prior to 1983 and into the 21st century will want to read a number of works by Lorrie Shepard. (2) My aim here is to offer brief reflections on three somewhat overlapping but enduring issues in educational assessment: validity, underrepresentation in outcome measures in intervention studies, and the burdens on the teacher of appropriate classroom VALIDITY is the most important issue in educational assessment, and if we are to have the national system of assessments called for in A Nation Risk, it is clearly a prime concern. Shortly after the report appeared, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Tests (hereafter Standards) in 1985 and Samuel Messick's chapter on validity in Robert Linn's Educational Measurement in 1989 clearly distinguished the concept of validity from earlier conceptions that a test was valid to the extent that it measured what it purported to measure. (3) The shift in thinking was toward the validity of inferences inferences made from test scores and the uses and consequences of testing. As defined by Messick, Validity is an integrated evaluative judgment of the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical rationales support the adequacy and appropriateness of inferences and actions based on test scores and other modes of assessment. (4) The 1999 edition of the Standards continued to support a unified concept of validity in which all validity is validity (a is the characteristic or concept that the test is designed to measure), the test professionals (jointly the developer and the user) are expected to specify what construct interpretation will be made based on the test score or score patterns, and the process of validation is the marshaling of evidence from multiple sources related to each of the intended inferences to be made from the test scores and patterns and the uses to which they will be put. The approved sources of evidence in the 1999 version reflect developments in research and test use since 1985. …