Design and Development Issues in Provincial Large-Scale Assessments

Designing Assessments to Inform Policy and Practice

Authors

  • Kadriye Ercikan University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia
  • Stephanie Barclay-McKeown University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3138/cjpe.0022.005

Abstract

Over the past four decades, there has been much debate on key sources of data in evaluating education, determining school effectiveness, and providing evidence to inform accountability and education planning. Entangled in this debate has been the extent to which large-scale assessments of learning provide valid evidence about the quality of schooling and education in Canada and how they can be used to inform education practice and policy. This article discusses five issues in large-scale assessments that are key for their usefulness and for making valid inferences. Based on recent research on assessment design and validity, the authors offer recommendations for large-scale assessments to better serve the multiple purposes they are intended to serve.

Downloads

Published

2008-01-21

How to Cite

Ercikan, K., & Barclay-McKeown, S. (2008). Design and Development Issues in Provincial Large-Scale Assessments: Designing Assessments to Inform Policy and Practice. Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 22(3), 53–71. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjpe.0022.005

Issue

Vol. 22 No. 3 (2008): Special Issue

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2008 Kadriye Ercikan, Stephanie Barclay-McKeown

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Authors contributing to The Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 (CC-BY-NC) license. This licence allows this work to be copied, distributed, remixed, transformed, and built upon for any purpose provided that appropriate attribution is given, a link is provided to the license, and changes made were indicated.

Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.