Psychometric Principles, Opportunities, and Associated Challenges in Simulation- and Game-Based Assessment through the Lens of a Four-Space Framework of Task Design

This chapter characterizes several principles of assessment and how they play out in simulation-based assessment environments. It is argued that these may be (optimistically) viewed as opportunities, as well as (considerably less optimistically) viewed as challenges to assessment, and in particular to psychometrics. The discussion is framed through an evidence-centered design (ECD) perspective (Mislevy et al., 2003), and trades heavily on a notion of task design in terms of the problem space, tool, space, solutions space, and response space (Behrens et al., 2012a). Examples of simulation-based assessments are used throughout to illustrate the key ideas.