ABSTRACT
This chapter re-interprets the nature and interrelationships of the elements of assessment design/interpretation arguments from a sociocognitive perspective. It includes a sociocognitive parsing of key measurement concepts such as constructs, task design, evaluating performances, cognitive versus psychometric difficulty, and contextualization of assessment, and the role in interpretation of an assessors’ knowledge about the relationship of students’ previous experience to the demands of tasks. The last of these will be important in the discussions of validity and fairness in subsequent chapters. A sociocognitive understanding of the elements of argument is integral to the situated meanings of the variables in measurement models. Ideas are illustrated with the running assessment examples.
