Evidence-Centered Design Approach to Assessments
What’s evidence centered design? It’s a model of making tests/assessments that grounds the entire [process of assessment] in empirical evidence of cognition and learning.
It's using evidence to build your tests!
It’s a process: using reasoning from evidence (such as student responses, or test results) to evaluate student learning.
But how?
Step one: Assessors begin with an examination of research evidence on how experts and beginners learn in a certain subject—then these findings are used in shaping the test.
Experts say: when you base your tests off research from the learning sciences, you can better identify when students succeed, and when they struggle.
Step two: Observation! Specific items or tasks are chosen with the goal of obtaining evidence of the desired knowledge and skills. Student responses to these tasks or tests create data, which is then used by developers to make inferences about student performance, such as:
“All students struggled to find surface area—they must not have mastered this skill yet.”
“Evidence-centered design starts with evidence about how learning happens in a domain”, and works from there—
unlike conventional test development, where tests are designed conceptually, and then applied.
What’s the assessment design process?
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These are the three components of the design process!
1) claim space: Set a goal—define precisely the knowledge you want students to have, and how you want them to know it.
2) evidence: What will you accept as evidence of knowledge? How will you analyze it?
3) task: How will the students prove that they know the material? What tasks will they complete to show this?
These three components aren’t steps—they have a reciprocal relationship to each other! Each piece of this puzzle has an impact on another. Our “goal” for knowledge can be shaped and changed by what we will accept as proof, and vice versa!
How is this relevant to the middle and high school classroom?
Tests and assessments! If you use student responses analytically, you can pinpoint areas of success and struggle, and shape further tests in response to this data!
Intentionality! This model of assessment making also affects how we plan lessons, and encourages us to think in terms of data—what is our precise goal? What will we accept as proof of success? How can the students demonstrate knowledge?