The Nebraska Student-Centered Assessment System (NSCAS) is a statewide assessment system that embodies Nebraska's holistic view of students and helps them prepare for success in postsecondary education, career, and civic life. It uses multiple measures throughout the year to provide educators and decision-makers at all levels with the insights…

The 2025-2026 Indiana Assessments Policy Manual communicates established guidelines regarding appropriate test administration in Indiana for key stakeholders including educators and Test Coordinators. This document contains policy guidance and appendices that delineate specific aspects of test implementation, including test security protocol,…

Recent years have produced a surge in interest in improving state assessment programs. Many states are designing new assessments. Much of this innovation is aimed at addressing longstanding areas of unhappiness with typical domain-sampled, end-of-year state assessments: States want to streamline assessment activities, enhance the instructional…

One of the substantive changes in the 2014 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing was the elevation of fairness in testing as a foundational element of practice in addition to validity and reliability. Previous research indicates that testing practices often do not align with professional standards and guidelines. Therefore, to raise…

In this digital ITEMS module, Dr. Robert [Bob] Mislevy and Dr. Maria Elena Oliveri introduce and illustrate a sociocognitive perspective on educational measurement, which focuses on a variety of design and implementation considerations for creating fair and valid assessments for learners from diverse populations with diverse sociocultural…

The completion rates were compared for long-form questions where a large blank answer space is provided and for long-form questions where the answer space has bullet-points prompts corresponding to the parts of the question. It was found that students were more likely to complete a question when bullet points were provided in the answer space.…

ETS experts are exploring and defining the standards for responsible AI use in assessments. A comprehensive framework and principles will be unveiled in the coming months. In the meantime, this document outlines the critical areas these standards will encompass, including the principles of: (1) Fairness and bias mitigation; (2) Privacy and…

Selection decisions have a major impact on our education, occupation, and quality of life, and the role of standardized tests in selection has always been a source of controversy. Here, I consider various definitions of fairness in measurement and selection--those emerging from within educational measurement and statistics, those from philosophy,…

The educational testing landscape is changing in many significant ways as evidence-based, principled assessment design (PAD) approaches are formally adopted. This article discusses the challenges and presents some score scale- and task-focused strategies for developing useful performance-level descriptors (PLDs) under a PAD approach. Details of…

Fairness in assessment is seen as increasingly important but there is a need for greater clarity in use of the term 'fair'. Also, fairness is perceived through a range of 'lenses' reflecting different traditions of thought. The lens used determines how fairness is seen and described. This article distinguishes different uses of 'fair' which have…

This framework marks the first in a series of five reports detailing the work of the Optimizing Assessment for All (OAA) project at Brookings to strengthen education systems' capacity to integrate 21st century skills (21CS) into teaching and learning, using assessment as a lever for changing classroom practices. In a world of rapid advancement and…

The tests we use to evaluate student achievement may well be sound measures of what students know, but they are faulty indicators at best of how well they have been taught. A remedy to this this situation of judging teachers by the performance of their students on high-stakes tests may be in hand already. We should look to the methods successfully…

This paper identifies important technological, financial, and equity challenges to the development and implementation of online or onscreen educational testing. The insights are based on the author's experiences in New Zealand of being the senior project manager for the Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning (asTTle) computer-based…

In the arena of educational testing, accessibility refers to the degree to which students are given the opportunity to participate in and engage a test. Accessibility theory is a model for examining the interactions between the test-taker and the test itself and defining how they may decrease some students' access to the test event, ultimately…

States and school districts are exploring alternatives to state tests for measuring teachers' contributions to student learning. One approach applies statistical value-added methods to alternative student assessments such as commercially available tests and end-of course tests. The evidence suggests that these methods can reliably distinguish…