Sometimes referred to as "the Bible[1]" of psychometricians and testing industry professionals, these standards represent operational best practice is validity, fairness, reliability, design, delivery, scoring, and use of tests. In addition, these standards are required knowledge for licensed psychologists and are included on the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP) (see Domain 8, KN62).[2]
In 2024, announcements were made that the three membership organizations (AERA, NCME, and APA) would be updating the guidelines once again. Ye Tong a Senior Vice President at the National Board of Medical Examiners[3] and University of Maryland Professor of Psychology Andres De Los Reyes[4]] were selected as the co-chairs of the committee in February, 2024.[5]
The current edition of The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing was released in July 2014. Five areas received particular attention in the 2014 revision: 1. Examining accountability issues associated with the uses of tests in educational policy 2. Broadening the concept of accessibility of tests for all examinees 3. Representing more comprehensively the role of tests in the workplace 4. Taking into account the expanding role of technology in testing 5. Improving the structure of the book for better communication of the standards
Previous versions
It was published on 1985, the 1999 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing has more in-depth background material in each chapter, a greater number of standards, and a significantly expanded glossary and index. The 1999 version Standards reflects changes in United Statesfederal law and measurement trends affecting validity; testing individuals with disabilities or different linguistic backgrounds; and new types of tests as well as new uses of existing tests. The Standards is written for the professional and for the educated layperson and addresses professional and technical issues of test development and use in education, psychology and employment.
Overview of organization and content
Part I: Test Construction, Evaluation, and Documentation
Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally covers specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and related activities. Psychometrics is concerned with the objective measurement of latent constructs that cannot be directly observed. Examples of latent constructs include intelligence, introversion, mental disorders, and educational achievement. The levels of individuals on nonobservable latent variables are inferred through mathematical modeling based on what is observed from individuals' responses to items on tests and scales.
Validity is the main extent to which a concept, conclusion, or measurement is well-founded and likely corresponds accurately to the real world. The word "valid" is derived from the Latin validus, meaning strong. The validity of a measurement tool is the degree to which the tool measures what it claims to measure. Validity is based on the strength of a collection of different types of evidence described in greater detail below.
Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, but has a Princeton address.
Educational assessment or educational evaluation is the systematic process of documenting and using empirical data on the knowledge, skill, attitudes, aptitude and beliefs to refine programs and improve student learning. Assessment data can be obtained from directly examining student work to assess the achievement of learning outcomes or can be based on data from which one can make inferences about learning. Assessment is often used interchangeably with test, but not limited to tests. Assessment can focus on the individual learner, the learning community, a course, an academic program, the institution, or the educational system as a whole. The word "assessment" came into use in an educational context after the Second World War.
Gwyneth M. Boodoo is an American psychologist and expert on educational measurement.
William Burton Michael, a student of J. P. Guilford, earned his Ph.D. in quantitative psychometric methods from the University of Southern California. He started his teaching career at Princeton University, and in 1952 joined the faculty at University of Southern California, where he received a joint appointment as an associate professor in psychology and education and as the director of the USC Testing Bureau. Michael authored over 500 publications on test construction, measurement and evaluation, and personality assessment. He also co-chaired a joint committee of the American Psychological Association (APA), American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) that published Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, which is the national and international standard of professional guidelines for testing and measurement in research and practice. One of his most widely read books is entitled "Handbook in research and evaluation : a collection of principles, methods, and strategies useful in the planning, design, and evaluation of studies in education and the behavioral sciences".
Lee Joseph Cronbach was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to psychological testing and measurement.
The Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation is an American/Canadian based Standards Developer Organization (SDO). The Joint Committee, created in 1975, represents a coalition of major professional associations formed in 1975 to develop evaluation standards and improve the quality of standardized evaluation. The Committee has thus far published three sets of standards for evaluations. The Personnel Evaluation Standards was published in 1988 and updated in 2008, The Program Evaluation Standards was published in 1994, and The Student Evaluation Standards was published in 2003.
The scientist–practitioner model, also called the Boulder Model, is a training model for graduate programs that provide applied psychologists with a foundation in research and scientific practice. It was initially developed to guide clinical psychology graduate programs accredited by the American Psychological Association (APA).
Cecil Randy Reynolds is an American psychology professor best known for his work in psychological testing and assessment.
Nambury S. Raju was an American psychology professor known for his work in psychometrics, meta-analysis, and utility theory. He was a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology.
Anne Anastasi was an American psychologist best known for her pioneering development of psychometrics. Her generative work, Psychological Testing, remains a classic text in which she drew attention to the individual being tested and therefore to the responsibilities of the testers. She called for them to go beyond test scores, to search the assessed individual's history to help them to better understand their own results and themselves.
Lloyd Bond was an American researcher in the field of psychometrics. As of 2009, he was a consulting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Stanford, California; he served as a senior scholar at the foundation from 2002 to 2008.
Test validity is the extent to which a test accurately measures what it is supposed to measure. In the fields of psychological testing and educational testing, "validity refers to the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores entailed by proposed uses of tests". Although classical models divided the concept into various "validities", the currently dominant view is that validity is a single unitary construct.
The Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP) is a licensing examination developed by the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards (ASPPB) that is used in most U.S. states and Canadian provinces.
Adaptive comparative judgement is a technique borrowed from psychophysics which is able to generate reliable results for educational assessment – as such it is an alternative to traditional exam script marking. In the approach, judges are presented with pairs of student work and are then asked to choose which is better, one or the other. By means of an iterative and adaptive algorithm, a scaled distribution of student work can then be obtained without reference to criteria.
The National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) is a U.S. based professional organization for assessment, evaluation, testing, and other aspects of educational measurement. NCME was launched in 1938 and previously operated under the name National Council on Measurements Used in Education.
Randy Elliot Bennett is an American educational researcher who specializes in educational assessment. He is currently the Norman O. Frederiksen Chair in Assessment Innovation at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. His research and writing focus on bringing together advances in cognitive science, technology, and measurement to improve teaching and learning. He received the ETS Senior Scientist Award in 1996, the ETS Career Achievement Award in 2005, the Teachers College, Columbia University Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016, Fellow status in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2017, the National Council on Measurement in Education's (NCME) Bradley Hanson Award for Contributions to Educational Measurement in 2019, the E. F. Lindquist Award from AERA and ACT in 2020, elected membership in the National Academy of Education in 2022, and the AERA Cognition and Assessment Special Interest Group Outstanding Contribution to Research in Cognition and Assessment Award in 2024. Randy Bennett was elected President of both the International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA), a worldwide organization primarily constituted of governmental and NGO measurement organizations, and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), whose members are employed in universities, testing organizations, state and federal education departments, and school districts.
Jacqueline P. Leighton is a Canadian-Chilean educational psychologist, academic and author. She is a full professor in the Faculty of Education as well as vice-dean of Faculty Development and Faculty Affairs at the University of Alberta.
Matthias von Davier is a psychometrician, academic, inventor, and author. He is the Executive Director of the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center in Lynch School of Education and Human Development and the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor in Education at Boston College.
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