Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment

"This book had a big influence on me because it came out in 2001, just as I finished my post-doc and got my first job as a professor. I was a psychologist interested in testing, and I knew that I had a real uphill battle. There weren’t many psychologists, it seemed, who were actually focused on cognitive psychology really working in the field, in the sense of really wanting to understand what test items measured in students. Most were quantitative psychologists working on just the numbers, mainly measurement models. “I think that we should, as testing specialists, be very aware of what the unintended consequences might be of the tests that we administer to children and frankly all learners. What are they really learning?” This book was one of the first to clearly articulate that we really have to think about the cognitive psychology behind the tests that we create. So one of the important parts of the book is that it includes what is called the ‘assessment triangle.’ We have to think about the observations we make, the interpretations that we make, and also about the cognition that we observe. So it’s a book that very clearly emphasises the need for us, as testing specialists, not just to think about the quantitative measurement model aspects of creating tests but also the psychological aspects of exactly what we’re measuring. Certainly there were some people writing about it. Susan Embretson , for example, is a psychologist and a testing specialist that I have admired for decades. She was one of the first scholars who I began reading about who was making this point—that we really need to create tests that are closely linked to the psychological constructs that we’re interested in measuring. But she was a lone voice in many ways. It wasn’t part of the everyday conversation about testing. Now it is. This book really opened the floodgates for a lot of research focused on cognition and assessment, with an increasing number of scholars taking Susan’s work and really running with it."