Evidence-Centered Design Principles - Pearlman Education 证据为中心的设计原则-珀尔曼教育.doc

Principles of Evidence-Centered Thinking Helping leaders develop an analytical habit of mind Experienced educational leaders have been bedeviled for decades by the gap between what they “know” to be true of the teaching and learning in the schools they lead, and the verifiable empirical evidence to support that “knowledge.” In the past decade, the relentless focus on standardized test results as the only credible evidence of the effectiveness of teaching and learning in a school has intensified the need to think more clearly and analytically about evidence that supports claims school leaders may need or wish to make about the state of the learning enterprise they oversee. We believe that one helpful approach to clarifying the discussion of the quality of teaching and learning in a school would be to borrow some analytical models from modern psychometric approaches to assessment development and apply them to the ongoing work of talking about what is really happening in a given school. The Concept of Validity The most important concept in assessment development and score interpretation is “validity.” This term refers to all of the evidence that can be amassed and discussed in support of a particular interpretation of an assessment result—a numerical score, a profile of scores, a written analysis of a complex performance, an expert judgment or set of judgments or any other summative outcome of an assessment experience. This is a critical concept because the point of virtually all assessments is the outcome—the “assessment” is constructed and designed to elicit certain behaviors, and these behaviors in turn lead to an interpretation. It is the interpretation that is the goal. Because many such “interpretations” are expressed in numerical scores, and because numerical scores appear to be trustworthy, it is often the case that the evidence structure that supports the interpretation is not examined, or even thought about. It is this evidence structure, however,