At the school and district levels, a high-quality system of assessments should advance equity by providing data that highlights learning outcomes and by providing learning experiences and information that support high-quality, college- and career-ready teaching and learning for each and every student and group of students. Efforts to embed equity in systems of assessment should embody broader systemic efforts to disrupt patterns of inequity, bias, and exclusion in our education systems while advancing more student-centered learning approaches. The array of data produced should include some information on college and career readiness that is comparable, valid, and reliable statewide, so that stakeholders have a sense of student learning across schools and districts and across groups of students.

Each assessment within a high-quality system—and the totality of the assessments within that system—should be aligned to college and career readiness, and inclusive of and accessible to all students, including students with disabilities and English language learners. Assessments should be designed to allow for accommodations for students with disabilities and English learners, be designed in a way that incorporates the principles of Universal Design for Learning, and should maintain high standards for all students. 

Assessments should be fair, as outlined in The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing developed jointly by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. Alternate assessments aligned to alternate achievement standards should only be administered where necessary and appropriate.

Additionally, knowledge, skills, and behaviors assessed should be those that can be taught and mastered in the classroom so that assessments do not presuppose students coming to school with prior knowledge from particular contexts.

Resources

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing

Accountability for College and Career Readiness: Developing a New Paradigm

Ensuring and Evaluating Assessment Quality for Innovative Assessment and Accountability Systems

Deeper Learning for Students with Disabilities

Equal Opportunity for Deeper Learning

The Implications of Deeper Learning for Adolescent Immigrants and English Language Learners

Starting from the principles outlined in Knowing What Students Know, a high-quality system of assessments should enable complete, coherent, continuous, and clear pictures of student and school progress to college and career readiness, in a way that data from individual assessments are often found lacking. To demonstrate this coherence, assessments should align with curriculum and instruction (horizontal coherence) so that assessment results are in alignment with expectations and what students are being taught.

Assessments should also align with each other within the system, so that formative assessments are coherent with summative and any other assessments, and so that, up and down the levels of classroom, school, district, and state assessments, the results provide a coherent picture (vertical coherence). Additionally, the assessment system should provide a picture of student learning over time (continuity), incorporating student learning progressions into the design of assessments across grade levels.

Data tools built to accompany the system of assessments should be tailored to the needs of different data users, such as students, parents, teachers, community leaders, and policymakers, for interpreting assessment data and identifying needed educational changes as a result of the data. These data should capture progress on mastering the variety of knowledge, skills, and behaviors needed for college and career readiness, and assessment data should be disaggregated by groups of students to the maximum extent possible for transparency.

High-quality information from the system of assessments should be timely, accessible, and clear for educators, students, families, schools, districts, and other stakeholders to support high-quality instructional shifts and engagement in the improvement process. This means that the various parts of an assessment system must work together across system levels. State and local data systems and data dashboards should also be updated to capture and display a fuller array of college- and career-readiness indicators.

Resources

Assessing Learning 

Performance Counts: Assessment Systems that Support High-Quality Learning

To Assess, To Teach, To Learn: A Vision for the Future of Assessment

Teachers at Work—Six Exemplars of Everyday Practice: The Student at the Center Series

How School Districts Can Support Deeper Learning: The Need for Performance Alignment

A high-quality system of assessments should be aligned with a state, district, or community’s clear theory of action around preparing students for college and career readiness. It should employ high standards of validity, reliability, and fairness for all students for each assessment contingent on the use of the specific assessment (e.g. formative vs. summative), aligned with the theory of action for that system. The system should also demonstrate coherence among the assessments, and each assessment should be used in a manner consistent with its intended purpose. Quality and validity take different forms depending on the purpose and use of the assessment.

Taken as a whole, the system of assessments should be guided by the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. The Standards make clear that test scores should not be used alone for consequential purposes, and when a system of multiple assessment points is aggregated together, the resulting data about student performance provide a more accurate picture when high-stakes decisions are being made.

Additionally, because processes for certifying the validity and reliability of a full system of assessment are still being developed and are continuously evolving, states, districts, and schools should examine the coherence of the system across all assessments in addition to the validity, reliability, and fairness of individual assessments.

Resources

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing

Not as Easy as It Sounds: Designing a Balanced Assessment System

Performance Counts: Assessment Systems that Support High-Quality Learning

To Assess, To Teach, To Learn: A Vision for the Future of Assessment

Project Narrative: Creating a State Vision to Support the Design and Implementation of an Innovative Assessment and Accountability System

A Framework for Conceptualizing and Evaluating the Validity of Instructionally Relevant Assessments