A case study in principled assessment design: Designing assessments to measure and support the development of argumentative reading and writing skills

This paper presents a principled approach to assessment design in which major design decisions are structured to support teaching and learning. This approach, developed as part of a long-term research initiative at ETS, Cognitively Based Assessments of, for and as Learning (CBAL), draws upon the learning and cognitive science literatures to create richly-structured assessments that simultaneously measure critical component skills and model effective strategies for applying those skills to complex performance tasks. To illustrate our approach, we focus on an important literacy practice: argumentation. Our model seeks to measure qualitative shifts in the development of critical argumentation skills by postulating argumentation learning progressions informed by the developmental literature. These learning progressions play a critical role in guiding assessment design decisions (selecting targeted skills, developing items to measure those skills, and determining task sequences) and may have the potential to support teachers’ instructional decisions that effectively scaffold the development of students’ argumentation skills.