ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed advances in the cognitive, psychometric, and technological tools, concepts, and theories germane to educational assessment. The challenge is to bring this exciting array of possibilities to bear in designing coherent assessments. This presentation describes a framework that facilitates communication, coherence, and efficiency in assessment design and task creation. It is the evidence-centered approach to assessment design introduced by Mislevy, Steinberg, and Almond (2003)—evidence-centered design (ECD). ECD builds on developments in fields such as expert systems (Breese, Goldman, & Wellman, 1994), software design (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, & Vlissides, 1994; Gardner, Rush, Crist, Konitzer, & Teegarden, 1998), and legal argumentation (Tillers & Schum, 1991) to make explicit, and to provide tools for, building assessment arguments that help both in designing new assessments and understanding familiar ones. This section presents the principles underlying ECD. Subsequent sections describe the layers of ECD, and an appendix provides additional resources for the theory and examples of practice that reflect the approach.
