ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the foundational area of fairness with an emphasis on the role and implications of fairness issues in the context of rater-mediated assessments. Fairness is a validity issue focused on minimizing construct-irrelevant barriers in order to obtain accurate estimates of person locations on the latent variable. The chapter discusses the historical development and provides an overview of some historical perspectives related to fairness in the context of educational assessment following the second half of the 20th century. Fairness is essentially a validity issue related to the comparability of test score interpretations for intended uses across groups of test takers. Specifically, threats to fairness include aspects of the testing procedure that produce systematic variance in test scores within subgroups that result in inappropriate interpretations and uses of test scores—construct-irrelevant variance. The chapter summarizes major concerns related to the some thematic clusters for fairness using questions that highlight concerns related to selected-response assessments and rater-mediated assessments.
