ABSTRACT
In the early days of educational testing, tests were developed for the purpose of making quantitative assessments of individuals’ general levels of ability and achievement relative to others within a group. The use of such norm-referenced tests was principally for selecting students to enter an educational program or for assessing the outcomes of instruction. The instructional need for precise information about the nature of a student’s prior knowledge of a given domain and of its development over the course of learning was not addressed. Criterion-referenced testing was introduced with the goal of promoting individualized, adaptive instruction (Glaser, 1963). These tests were intended to give direct information about what particular knowledge and skills a student has attained, not normative assessments of a student’s standing within a skill domain. Viewed from a cognitive perspective, such tests were to provide knowledge of a student’s prior mental models, misconceptions, or problem solving skills. This information would have a great bearing on the kinds of problems that the student should be given to promote learning, as well as on the nature of the hints and explanations of problem solving that are likely to be most helpful in learning. By measuring students’ knowledge and skills as they are acquired during learning, more effective instructional manipulations could be introduced that would serve the needs of the individual student. This concept of a criterion-referenced test is a precursor to the idea of creating a student model within an intelligent tutoring system.
