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Application of Evidence-Centered Design to State Large-Scale Science Assessment

Geneva Haertel, Britte Haugan Cheng, Ron Fried, Tom Gaffney, Angela Haydel DeBarger, Liliana Ructtinger

Application of Evidence-Centered Design to State Large-Scale Science Assessment (ECDLarge) emerged as a response to the need to improve the approach to developing quality assessments of large-scale assessments by combining developments in cognitive psychology with advances in measurement theory and technology. Large-scale assessments are designed for large groups of examinees, typically numbering in the thousands, and often administered to make high-stakes decisions. In this project, we are focusing on the science part of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments—Series II; state tests that help districts measure student progress toward Minnesota's academic standards.

ECDLarge builds on the technology established through the Principled Assessment Designs for Inquiry (PADI) project, a patented online technology that methodically structures the design of complex multi-step and open-ended assessment tasks. This project is a special-case implementation of the evidence-centered assessment design framework developed at the Educational Testing Service by Mislevy, Steinberg, and Almond, which explicates the interrelationships among substantive arguments, assessment designs, and operational processes.

ECDLarge combines the expertise of researchers at SRI International and from the Department of Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation (EDMS) at the University of Maryland, as well as Pearson Educational Measurement, a well-respected developer and administrator of large-scale assessments, and the Minnesota Department of Education, a leader in large-scale online assessments in the United States.

3/2008 - 2/2012 (current)