The Struggle is Real: Tackling Alignment Challenges in a Changing Assessment World

Alignment has served as a principal criterion in the validity evaluation of standards-based assessments. However, changes in the educational landscape including innovative approaches to the design of an educational system, more complex systems of standards, different types of measurement strategies, and alternative approaches to assessment design have strained the credibility of traditional alignment approaches. Unlike other areas of assessment design and evaluation, alignment methodology has had relatively less attention and scrutiny in professional settings and scholarly publications. In this session, panelists who work with educational assessment systems designing, conducting, and evaluating alignment studies will present and discuss such challenges, including:

1) Defining the purpose of the alignment evaluation,
2) Identifying the components of the system to be aligned (e.g., claims, standards, PLDs/ALDs, test form(s), score scales),
3) Determining the scope of the alignment study,
4) Determining the classes of evidence used for evaluating alignment (e.g., content, knowledge/skills, cognitive complexity, judgmental consistency), and
5) Interpreting the alignment results (e.g., weight attributed to alignment vs. other types of evidence, and whether the evaluation/interpretation should vary based on the claims).