Making performance assessments part of accountability

Self-Monitoring Assessments for Educational Accountability Systems

Test-based accountability is now the cornerstone of U.S. education policy, and it is becoming more important in many other nations as well. Educators sometimes respond to test-based accountability in ways that produce score inflation. In the past, score inflation has usually been evaluated by comparing trends in scores on a high-stakes test to trends on a lower-stakes audit test. However, separ...

Designing Accountability Assessments for Teaching - Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation

We argue (1) that the domains of externally mandated tests should be transparent to teachers, (2) that test maps can be used to communicate with teachers, and (3) that the most effective test maps express domains in terms of combinations of what students know and can do. We propose a device called a heuristic as the lowest level of specificity in a test map, and criteria to achieve a balance be...

Making a case for shared accountability.

Making risk assessments more comparable and repeatable

Many of the objections to implementing Risk Management and acting upon risk results hinge on the subjectivity of the risk assessment system. This subjectivity makes it difficult to make risk assessments justifiable, repeatable, and comparable over an entire project, program, or organization. One cannot easily justify assigning a 30% likelihood to a risk occurring when others with more, the same...

Making Sense of Test-Based Accountability in Education