Advancing Methodologies to Support Both Summative and Formative Assessments

A volume in the Chinese American Educational Researchand Development Association Book SeriesSeries Editor Jinfa Cai, University of DelawareOver the past thirty years, student assessment has become an increasingly importantcomponent of public education. A variety of methodologies in testing have been developed toobtain and interpret the wealth of assessment outcomes. As assessment goals are gettingincreasingly multifaceted, new testing methodologies are called for to provide more accessibleand reliable information on more complex constructs or processes, such as students' criticalthinkingand problem-solving skills.Testing methodologies are needed to extract information from assessments on such complicated skills, in order to advise teachersabout certain areas of students that need intervention. It is even a bigger challenge, and a vital mission of today's large-scaleassessments, to gain such information from testing data in an efficient manner. For example PARCC and Smarter BalancedAssessments consortia are both striving to offer formative assessments through individualized, tailored testing. The book providesstate-of-the-art coverage on new methodologies to support tradit ional summative assessment, and more importantly, for emergingformative assessments.