A Framework for Reusing Assessment Components

Summary

The purpose of an assessment determines a myriad of details about the delivery, presentation, and scoring of that assessment and consequently the authoring of tasks for that assessment. This paper explores the relationship between design requirements and authoring through the use of the Four Process Framework for Assessment Delivery. This ideal assessment delivery architecture describes an assessment delivery environment in terms of four processes:

• Activity Selection—The process which picks the next task or item;

• Presentation —The process which presents the item and captures the work product produced by the participant;

• Response Processing—The process which examines the participants response to a particular task and sets the values of observable outcome variables based on that response; and

• Summary Scoring—The process which is responsible for accumulating evidence across many tasks in an assessment.

This framework has proved useful in our own work in Evidence Centered Design, and is being adopted as part of the IMS Global Consortium’s specification for Question and Test Interoperability.

To illustrate how changes in requirements bring about changes in design, we explore several variations on the theme of a kanji character reading and writing test. While varying the purpose from drill and practice to admission into a calligraphy school, the four-process framework shows how the assessment delivery must change to accommodate the new purpose.