Analysis Framework

The Assessment Triangle

Every assessment, regardless of its purpose or the context in which it is used, rests on three pillars: 1) a model of how students represent knowledge and develop competence in the subject domain, 2) tasks or situations that allow one to observe students' performance, and 3) interpretation methods for drawing inferences from the performance evidence thus obtained.

These three foundational elements -- cognition, observation, and interpretation -- influence all aspects of an assessment's design and use, including content, format, scoring, reporting, and use of the results.

Even though these elements are sometimes more implicit than explicit, they are still influential. In fact, it is often the tacit nature of the foundations and the failure to question basic assumptions about one or more of the three elements and their interconnection that creates conflicts about the meaning and value of assessment results.

The committee developed a framework for thinking about the foundations of assessment, referred to as the assessment triangle, which is based on the idea of assessment as a process of reasoning from evidence (Mislevy, 1996). The assessment triangle is useful for analyzing current assessments or designing new ones.

Every assessment, regardless of its purpose or the context in which it is used, rests on three pillars: 1) a model of how students represent knowledge and develop competence in the subject domain, 2) tasks or situations that allow one to observe students' performance, and 3) interpretation methods for drawing inferences from the performance evidence thus obtained. These three foundational elements--cognition, observation, and interpretation--influence all aspects of an assessment's design and use, including content, format, scoring, reporting, and use of the results. Even though these elements are sometimes more implicit than explicit, they are still influential. In fact, it is often the tacit nature of the foundations and the failure to question basic assumptions about one or more of the three elements and their interconnection that creates conflicts about the meaning and value of assessment results.

The three elements are represented as corners of a triangle because each is connected to and dependent on the other two. A central tenet of this course is that for an assessment to be effective, the three elements must be in synchrony.

The cognition corner of the triangle refers to a theory or set of beliefs about how students represent knowledge and develop competence in a subject domain. The theory should represent the most scientifically credible understanding of typical ways in which learners represent knowledge and develop expertise in a domain. These findings should derive from cognitive and educational research about how people learn, as well as the experience of expert teachers. As scientific understanding of learning evolves, the cognitive underpinnings of assessment should change accordingly. Our use of the term "cognition" is not meant to imply that the theory must necessarily come from a single cognitive research perspective. As discussed later, theories of student learning and understanding can take different forms and encompass several levels and types of knowledge representation that include social and contextual components.

It would be unrealistic to expect that assessment design will take into account every subtlety and complexity about learning in a domain that has been uncovered by research. Instead, what is being proposed is that assessment design be based on a representation or approximation of cognition that is consistent with a richer psychological perspective, at a level of detail that is sufficient to get the job of assessment done. Any model of learning underlying an assessment will necessarily be a simplification of what is going on in the head of the examinee and in the social situation within which the assessment takes place.