Robyn Pinilla: Creating a Bridge Between Research and Practice for Valid Assessment Use

While the educational measurement and assessment community asserts that tests themselves are not valid but that inferences made based on scores require validation (Cizek et al., 2008; Kane, 2013), this message has not been well translated to educators. A test's development, purpose, and use should align to interpret scores and make informed decisions properly. However, usage in practice does not always align with intended purposes. Researchers could help prepare teachers to use tests in valid ways, specifically with novel assessment formats necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditionally, the measurement and assessment community placed the onus of valid use and interpretation on the end-user, the teacher. We herein propose streamlining a process in which researchers make validity evidences accessible and understandable to teachers. We examine what sources of validity evidence support classroom assessment use, how teachers can access this information in a meaningful way, and what sources of validity evidence seem superfluous or missing from the extant literature. This research proposes a method for researchers to facilitate valid use and interpretation of tests by gathering sources of validity evidence in a practitioner friendly format to put the end-users, teachers, at the forefront of the test validation process.