This chapter addresses assessment (testing) with an emphasis on the 100-year period since the American Education Research Association was formed. The authors start with definitions and explanations of contemporary tests. They then look backward into the 19th century to significant work by Horace Mann and Herbert Spencer, who engendered two…

Results from a performance assessment in which 68 high school students wrote essays support the use of latent variable modeling for estimating reliability, concurrent validity, and generalizability of a scoring rubric. The latent variable modeling approach overcomes the limitations of certain conventional statistical techniques in handling…