I was honored to participate in a validity “town hall” at last week’s NCME conference with Suzanne Lane, my co-author of the validity chapter in the upcoming 5^th edition of Educational Measurement, and Greg Cizek, Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina. It’s no secret that Greg and I have had some disagreements about validity theory and validation over the years, particularly about the role of consequences. It was a lively session, but Jon Twing, Senior VP at Pearson, kept control of things as the moderator.

After two years of virtual conferences, meetings, and just about everything else, Center professionals are excited to gather in San Diego from April 21-25 for the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council of Measurement in Education (NCME). 

The interest in using through-year assessment systems in place of traditional end-of-year state summative assessments has been increasing rapidly and was the subject of a convening hosted by the Center for Assessment in November 2021.

The U.S. Department of Education followed an all too familiar pattern of publishing important guidance just before the Christmas holiday, dropping a lump of coal in the stockings of state accountability directors. The gift, or Christmas miracle, that states needed was an acknowledgment that federal school accountability requirements need to be revised, not simply restarted. Unfortunately, the draft requirements simply discuss (direct) how states must restart their accountability systems in 2021-2022 after what has essentially been a 2-year accountability hiatus. 

In my recent post, I promised to reveal the type of through year assessment design I’d like to see. After providing some background and context, I provide a high-level description of my design for a through year assessment system that promotes deeper learning while alleviating many of the problems caused by current assessment designs.

I titled my 2020 year-end CenterLine post, “Oh, What a Year!” with hopes that we were turning the pandemic corner. There’s no question the widespread availability of vaccines beginning in early spring 2021 gave us all a sense of hope only to have it dashed and renewed multiple times throughout this year following COVID’s ebb and flow.

“Through year” or “through course” assessment systems are rapidly proliferating as an alternative to the single, end-of-year administration of state accountability tests. There are at least ten states and associated assessment companies in various stages of exploration, design, and/or development of these systems.

I and many others were concerned that the uncertainty with interpreting Spring 2021 state summative test scores because of all the “noise” associated with the pandemic would blur any signal we were trying to hear from the data. Unfortunately, that signal is so loud that we can’t miss it. In spite of any uncertainty, we have more than enough information to pull the policy alarm!

Assumptions lead to claims about the types of inferences and uses that an assessment system is intended to support. Strong assumptions require strong evidence. This axiom holds true for educational measurement and most other scientific endeavors. The current interest in through year assessments appears to be based on very strong assumptions about the multiple purposes through year assessments may serve. Is there evidence to support these assumptions?

Five states have been approved to implement innovative assessment pilots as part of the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA) under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). As part of our 2021 Reidy Interactive Lecture Series (RILS) on assessment innovation, we thought it was critical to hear directly from these IADA leaders.