While classroom feedback has been shown to be a key mediating factor in students' learning process and performance, the bulk of current research on feedback in the field of foreign language education has largely focused on how teachers respond to students' linguistic errors. Published research on how students in a foreign language context respond…

Analyzing students' growth remains an important topic in educational research. Most recently, Diagnostic Classification Models (DCMs) have been used to track skill acquisition in a longitudinal fashion, with the purpose to provide an estimate of students' learning trajectories in terms of the change of fine-grained skills overtime. Response time…

While assessment for learning (AfL) has been strongly promulgated by an increasing number of education systems internationally, little research is available that investigates students' responses to such AfL innovations, particularly in a Chinese learning context. There is a need to research and evaluate the AfL practices introduced and their…

In his focus article, Koretz (this issue) argues that accountability has become the primary function of large-scale testing in the United States. He then points out that tests being used for accountability purposes are flawed and that the high-stakes nature of these tests creates a context that encourages score inflation. Koretz is concerned about…

The Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) provide a wide-ranging commentary and vision of the interrelationships among curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Specifically, they describe how the Berkeley Evaluation & Assessment Research (BEAR) Center Assessment System can be used to integrate and systematize these areas. This commentary focuses on…

Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) commendably attempt to put descriptive theory at the center of pedagogy, assessment, and curriculum. The thrust of their article is that only through theories of learning will student progression be properly understood. Casting a critical eye over the faddish distinction between "formative" and "summative"…

Those who work in second- and foreign-language testing often find Koretz's concern for validity inferences under high-stakes (VIHS) conditions both welcome and familiar. While the focus of the article is more narrowly on the potential for two instructional responses to test-based accountability, "reallocation" and "coaching,"…

In this rejoinder, the authors provide their thoughts on each of the commentaries of the seven respondents to their article. They find that the response of Kyngdon differs markedly from the others in questioning some basic elements of the methods of analysis that they propose for the construction of a "road map." The authors emphasize that they…

Validation research for educational achievement tests is often limited to an examination of intended test score interpretations. This article calls for an expansion of validation research in three dimensions. First, validation must attend to actual test use and its consequences, not just score meaning. Second, validation must attend to unintended…

Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) lay out a comprehensive vision for the way that learning progressions (or other "road maps") might be used to inform and coordinate formative and summative purposes of assessment. As Black, Wilson, and others have been arguing for over a decade, the effective use of formative assessment has great potential to…

The notion of the road map, advocated by Black, Wilson, and Yao (2011), and the associated minutiae of the construct map have several powerful features. At one level these notions assist the teacher to select and embody a suitable sequence of constructs within a specified curriculum. Whatever disparate sequenced pathways individual learners may…

Ten years ago, the authors of Knowing What Students Know proposed that large-scale and classroom assessment should be created from the same underlying model of learning. They suggested that, ideally, a model of learning should provide a developmental perspective, "laying out one or more typical progressions from novice levels toward competence and…

Schilling et al. (this issue) have done a commendable job in illustrating a comprehensive process of validating assessments of teacher knowledge (and, more broadly, other types of tests as well). On one hand, the concrete illustration of a process that often remains murky and incomplete is profoundly heartening, as it provides a rigorous model for…

Teacher knowledge has been of theoretical and empirical interest for over two decades, and development of measures is overdue. The researchers represented in this volume have been breaking new ground by developing a measure of mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) without guiding precedents, and in the face of differing perspectives on teacher…

Operating from multiple literature bases in cognitive psychology, mathematics education, and theoretical and applied psychometrics, Schilling, Hill and their colleagues provide a systemic approach to studying the validity of scores of mathematical knowledge for teaching. This system encompasses an array of task formats and methodologies. The…