Curriculum-Based Assessment

The term curriculum-based assessment (CBA) was initially popularized with the publication of a special issue of Exceptional Children on that topic in 1985. In that issue, CBA was identified as a practice with a long history in education and characterized as the practice of using the content of instruction as the basis for assessing what students are learning. While appealing, this description does not clearly distinguish CBA from traditional educational achievement tests that use a table of specifications to establish test content validity. A table of specifications frames the content of instruction, and that framework is used to design test items that representatively sample intended instructional outcomes.

More salient differences can be identified between CBA and traditional achievement testing. First, in CBA, the very curriculum materials used during instruction are often used as the “test” stimuli for appraising student learning. Second, direct observation and recording of responses to those selected curriculum materials are used to quantify student performance. Third, interobserver agreement is often, but not always, the technique used to establish test reliability in CBA. Finally, social validity is a common approach for justifying the use of information gathered through CBA. These four distinctive features form the basis for arguing that the information gathered from observing student performance in the curriculum through CBA more “authentically” reflects the real goals of instruction in the classroom than commonly available, standardized, norm-referenced achievement tests. The argument for increased authenticity is based on the view that the information gleaned through CBA relates more directly to the learning experience of the student and that direct observation of performance with the materials of daily instruction is a more naturalistic approach to quantifying student learning.