ABSTRACT
Educational assessment is a special case of evidentiary reasoning, which in turn is a special case of argument. The structure of educational assessments can be understood in terms of concepts and representational forms for arguments. The elements of Toulmin’s argument structure are reviewed and then related to the design of assessments, the definition of constructs, and the interpretation of results. This chapter uses familiar kinds of assessments and psychological perspectives to fix the ideas. We see how psychological perspectives impact the nature of claims, evidence, warrants, and qualifiers in assessment and recognize the elaborations of the basic structure that are needed to accommodate increasingly complicated arguments.
