ABSTRACT
For the last several decades, school districts and states have established performance standards on state criterion-referenced tests (Glass, 1978). During the past decade, states have been required to do so in order to comply with federal accountability and reporting requirements of the No Child Left Behind legislation (NCLB, 2001). In practically every case, these performance standards are determined with the help of state content-based performance level descriptors (PLDs). This is reflected in nearly all standard setting methods, including the two most popular methods, the Modified Angoff method (Angoff, 1971; see also Plake & Cizek, Chapter 10 of this volume) and the more recent Bookmark method (Mitzel, Lewis, Patz, & Green, 2001; see also Lewis, Mitzel, Mercado, & Schulz, Chapter 12 of this volume). Both methods have been tweaked, but continue to be used in many district and state testing programs, as well as on nationally norm-referenced tests and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
