Project Description

In the Alternate Assessment Design—Mathematics (AAD-M) project, SRI International is working with Utah, Idaho, and Florida to achieve the following goals:

1. Extend the conceptual framework of evidence-centered design (ECD) to alternate assessment based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS) using the Principled Assessment Design for Inquiry (PADI) assessment design system;


2. Integrate the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with ECD to guide the development of tasks that are accessible to all learners;


3. Use the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Principles and Standards for School Mathematics to identify common expectations that represent critical areas of learning common across all three states in Number and Operations, Algebra, Geometry, Measurement, and Data Analysis and Probability;


4. Develop AA-AAS assessment design patterns, task templates, assessment task specifications, and exemplar tasks that address priority state academic standards in mathematics for students with significant cognitive disabilities;


5. Evaluate the exemplar assessment tasks produced using ECD through pilot-testing in all three states;


6. Enhance the human capital of state departments of education staff in learning how to use ECD to design and develop assessment tasks for use with students with significant cognitive disabilities, including the provision of procedural guidelines;


7. Support state department of education staff and teachers in the development of additional performance tasks in mathematics to expand the task bank for each state; and


8. Provide participating states with a library of design patterns, task templates, and task specifications that are reusable and extendable to the authoring of additional performance tasks in mathematics.

To date a number of obstacles have hindered the design and development of high quality AA-AAS assessments. These obstacles include a lack of:

• Design procedures that tightly align assessment tasks to academic content standards of interest;
• A systematic process to identify the sources of construct irrelevant variance that contribute to measurement error and procedures to mitigate against these sources of error;
• Attention to principles of universal design for learning (UDL) during the task design phase that can address the variations in student characteristics; and
• Documentation of the assessment design procedures and decisions that support all stages of task development and make explicit the underlying validity argument.

This project addresses these obstacles by emulating and extending the ECD approach to the design of alternate assessments (AA-AAS). ECD is a practical theory-based approach to developing quality assessments that combines developments in cognitive psychology and advances in measurement theory and technology. ECD is a well-understood process that can be used in all stages of assessment design and development, from domain analysis, to the specification of student, evidence, and task models, to the creation of items and tasks, and culminating with the design of an assessment delivery system. Although each of the collaborating states has unique needs, ECD provides a robust and suitable approach that can be applied to each state’s needs and customized accordingly. A synergistic application of ECD and UDL to the development of performance tasks makes valid academic assessment available to students with significant cognitive disabilities and boosts expectations for their achievement.