This National Academy of Education (NAEd) volume provides guidance to key stakeholders on how to accurately report and interpret comparability assertions concerning large-scale educational assessments as well as how to ensure greater comparability by paying close attention to key aspects of assessment design, content, and procedures. The goal of…

The global spread of national assessment testing activities, and the growing pressure to move beyond basic measures of participation in educational monitoring, means that student achievement measures are likely to become increasingly relevant indicators of systemic progress in the developing world. Using data from the CESSP project in Cambodia,…

Various applications of item response theory often require linking to achieve a common scale for item parameter estimates obtained from different groups. This article used a simulation to examine the relative performance of four different item response theory (IRT) linking procedures in a random groups equating design: concurrent calibration with…

Research evidence indicates that formative assessment is one of the most effective ways of enhancing student learning. It is, however, difficult to implement successfully, principally because what is tested through summative assessment has such a powerful influence on teacher and student actions. This book scrutinizes the relationship between…

In this research investigation of score comparability for language minority students (English language learners [ELLs] and former English language learners), we examined 3 indicators of score comparability (reliability, internal test structure, and differential item functioning) for 4th and 8th grade students who took the NCLB-mandated content…

Much of the argument about comparability of examination standards is at cross-purposes; contradictory positions are in fact often both defensible, but they are using the same words to mean different things. To clarify this, two broad conceptualisations of standards can be identified. One sees the standard in the observed phenomena of performance…

Paul Newton (2010), with his characteristic concern about theory, has set out two different ways of thinking about the basis upon which equivalences of one sort or another are established between test score scales. His reason for doing this is a desire to establish "the defensibility of linkages lower on the continuum than concordance."…

The rank-ordering method for standard maintaining was designed for the purpose of mapping a known cut-score (e.g. a grade boundary mark) on one test to an equivalent point on the test score scale of another test, using holistic expert judgements about the quality of exemplars of examinees' work (scripts). It is a novel application of an old…

This article presents the author's rejoinder to thinking about linking from issue 8(1). Particularly within the more embracing linking frameworks, e.g., Holland & Dorans (2006) and Holland (2007), there appears to be a major disjunction between (1) classification discourse: the supposed basis for classification, that is, the underlying theory…

"Linking" is a term given to a general class of procedures by which one represents scores X on one test or measure in terms of scores Y on another test or measure. A recent taxonomy by Holland and Dorans (2006; Holland, 2007) organizes the various types of links into three broad categories: prediction, scale aligning, and equating. In…

Robert Coe has claimed that three broad conceptions of comparability can be identified from the literature: performance, statistical and conventional. Each of these he rejected, in favour of a single, integrated conception which relies upon the notion of a "linking construct" and which he termed "construct comparability".…

Newton's article (2010) makes three main contributions to the literature. First, it is transatlantic, bringing together literatures that have been dealing with similar problems, using sometimes different methods and certainly with distinctive educational, cultural perspectives. He points out that neither of these literatures has all of the…

The article "Thinking About Linking" by Newton (2010) presents a novel philosophical perspective on the way that educational assessments should be linked. Newton starts by describing the linking framework as it was characterized in various publications and identifies a cross-cultural dimension in the definitions and uses of test…

Responding to a survey requires cognitive abilities similar to those for any other linguistic task. We argue that, when faced with a cognitively challenging task, individuals respond by simplifying the task, declining it, or performing it poorly. Using the 2003 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA 2003) data sets, we document that…

This article traces quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) developments in Finnish compulsory schooling. The central question is this: Is there a Finnish model of QAE? We conclude that it may be a rhetorical overstatement to speak about a specific Finnish 'Model' of QAE in a strong sense. However, neither is it valid to conclude that what happens…