Mapping U.S. States' Testing Programs to Unveil Testing Purposes: Insights and Lesson Learned

• In Event: Enhancing Validity and Reliability in Educational Measurement and Assessments

Abstract

Testing purposes are considered a critical component in designing and developing tests because of their guiding role in every step of the process. Therefore, test purposes should be clearly stated, very specific, appropriate for the education system level, and not numerous. The proposed paper explores the test purposes characteristics of the 50 states and the District of Columbia standardized summative tests. The study focused on three questions: (1) What test purposes are states pursuing? (2) What characteristics do these purposes have? And (3) How are test purposes presented to the public? The proposed paper describes how the purpose(s) of each state were gathered, classified, and analyzed. We report information about 242 purposes identified across the states and their characteristics.

Authors

• Eunjung Myoung, Stanford University

• Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo, Stanford University