Evidence-Centered Design

Evidence-centered design (ECD) is part of a family of principled assessment design approaches that provide coherence between assessment design, development, and methods for making inferences from test scores. First introduced in the late 1990s by Robert Mislevy, Russell Almond, and Linda Steinberg at Educational Testing Service, ECD provides a series of concepts, procedures, and tools to guide assessment design, development, and implementation decisions to clarify the inferences that are to be made about test-takers on the basis of their test scores. ECD is based on ideas drawn from Samuel Messick’s construct-centered definition of validity as described in the third edition of Educational Measurement published by the American Council on Education, Michael Kane’s argument-based notion of validity as described in the fourth edition of Educational Measurement, ...