This award is in support of a large international conference on validity issues in assessment with a focus on validity in use (i.e., in practice by educators and policymakers rather than researchers). There is a special focus on innovations in assessment across the world with the notion that the US can learn from these exemplars. The principle problems in validity of assessments lie in the application and use of the assessments rather than in the tests themselves. These problems have been ignored by stakeholders in the assessment industry and research community to the detriment of the use of assessments in policy and decision making. Two highly regarded organizations are working together in sponsoring this conference---Teachers College and the Educational Testing Service (ETS).
The knowledge generated from this conference will be disseminated through a published edited volume and through a series of "e-flyers" written in user-friendly language and intended for practitioners and policymakers.
While educational tests and testing programs are ubiquitous today, the validity (or the meaningfulness and defensibility) of information obtained from widely-used tests around the world is sometimes compromised or challenged in practice and policy contexts due to factors which are not well documented or understood. Some of these factors might concern the test itself (such as, inadequate domain frameworks, poorly constructed items or scales). Others, however, may lie completely outside a test, having to do with ways in which particular instruments and information generated by the assessments are used (or misused) in applied policy and practice environments. To address this long-standing issue, the Assessment and Evaluation Research Initiative (AERI) at Teachers College-Columbia University (TC) and Educational Testing Service (ETS) co-hosted an inaugural international conference on the theme: Educational Assessment, Accountability, and Equity: Conversations on Validity Around the World. The program aimed to promote more valid and meaningful use of educational assessment and evaluation information in high stakes test-use contexts around the world by facilitating an open dialogue among academics, policy-makers, technical and non-technical stakeholders of testing and assessment programs, as well as parents, teachers, and the public/media. The program was co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), ETS, and TC. The conference was 1 1/2 days in length, held on March 28-29, 2012. It was attended by over 250 international guests, including members of testing organizations, ministers and representatives of education departments from different nations, university-based academics and researchers, policy-makers, teachers and teacher union representatives, school-based leaders and superintendents, as well as parents. The Conference Program included four sessions, each with one (1) keynote speaker and four (4) discussants; please see Conferences and Forums at www.tc.edu/aeri Activities sponsored by NSF included the travel support for invited speakers and assessment program "stakeholders", production of intellectual papers for a special issue of the Teachers College Record (an academic journal), and production of an edited volume on "Validity and Test Use" focusing on the technical topics of validity, validation and test use, and consequential validity. In addition, the project team produced four (4) stakeholder-friendly policy briefs that will be electronically disseminated concurrently with the academic publications to the database of 250+ attendees and via national and international partner organizations. The program involved and supported 16 graduate students, four (4) post-doctoral scholars, and eight (8) invited stakeholders, along with speakers and organizers of Session 4.
