ABSTRACT
For over a decade, educators have been confronted by urgent demands for evidence of improved instruction and increased student learning. These demands emerged in an era marked by new understandings about learning and cognition, previously unimagined technologies, and advancements in the statistical methods needed to model psychological constructs. The process of generating the Achievement Level Descriptors (ALDs) is iterative, and the emergence of new or refined claims or evidence statements may point to the need to generate new or refine existing ALDs. These ALDs extend the chain of reasoning in terms of the validity argument from pairs of claims and evidence to the intended score interpretation. In other words, the claims and evidence pairs are mapped to the score scale. Evidence-Centered Design can also be used to aid the development of selected response items. A selected response item comprises the stem and a set of response options (the correct answer and the distractors).
