Education in Doctor of Medicine programs has moved towards an emphasis on clinical competency, with entrustable professional activities providing a framework of learning objectives and outcomes to be assessed within the clinical environment. While the identification and structured definition of objectives and outcomes have evolved, many methods…

The dangers of a single story in current U.S. large-scale writing assessment are that assessment practice does not align with theory and this practice has negative effects on instruction and students. In this article, I analyze the connections or lack of connections among writing theory, writing assessment, and writing instruction, critique the…

With funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Virtual Performance Assessment project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is developing and studying the feasibility of immersive virtual performance assessments (VPAs) to assess scientific inquiry of middle school students as a standardized component of an accountability…

We present a method for assessing science inquiry performance, specifically for the inquiry skill of designing and conducting experiments, using educational data mining on students' log data from online microworlds in the Inq-ITS system (Inquiry Intelligent Tutoring System; www.inq-its.org). In our approach, we use a 2-step process: First we use…

With a construct-centered reliability analytical approach the reliability analysis should crystallize the multi-traits or constructs that the test specialists developed to measure from student performance and then estimate the degree of fit between the theoretical expectations of test developers and the performance exhibited by students. This…

Used a multitrait-multimethod approach to investigate the validity of scores on locally prepared performance assessments taken by 6,000 third and fourth graders in reading, language arts, and mathematics. A partial explanation for the lack of construct validity evidence for the performance assessment scores is the probable low reliability of…

This study investigated construct validity and factorial invariance of a performance assessment of reading comprehension and writing proficiency through a multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) structure using confirmatory factor analysis. The performance assessment was administered to 1,023 fifth and sixth graders. Interrater reliability was examined for…