ABSTRACT

There has been a renewed interest in using performance assessments that are grounded in academic standards reflecting 21st-century thinking skills with the advent of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative (Council of Chief State School Officers & National Governors Association, 2010) and the Race to the Top initiative (U.S. Department of Education). To ensure that academic standards are set high for all students, states have been charged to develop assessment systems for “standards against which student achievement has traditionally been difficult to measure“and to include “items that will be varied and elicit complex student demonstrations or applications of knowledge and skills” (U.S. Department of Education, 2009, p. 8). Such a call has direct implications for the design of performance assessments in educational testing programs, requiring the need to measure “complex student demonstrations.”