Student Profile Scoring for Formative Assessment

Summary

This paper is adapted from an invited address delivered by Professor Stout and a symposium presentation delivered by Dr. DiBello at the 2001 International Meeting of the Psychometric Society, Osaka, Japan. This first IMPS meeting to be held in Japan was an auspicious occasion for bringing together statisticians and psychometricians from Japan with their North American and European colleagues. It provided an important forum for discussing new opportunities for assessment in the twenty-first century that result from a fortuitous conjunction of heightened public attention to school effectiveness and new psychometric methods that allow the practical operationalization of more complex cognitive models. In this paper we recall the term formative assessment as it is used in education, and define a class of scoring procedures called student profile scoring. We describe the formative aspects of the mostly summative US No Child Left Behind legislation. We outline the simple cognitive modeling that is reflected in the reparameterized unified model. We close with a call to psychometricians for a paradigm shift that moves the testing industry beyond an almost exclusive focus on low dimensional, data reductionist methods to include student profile scoring based on richer, substantively-grounded models.