Evidence-Centered Design for Classroom Assessment

This is a working project attempting the translate the language of evidence-centered assessment design (ECD; Mislevy, Steinberg & Almond, 2003) for use in designing classroom assessments. This includes both formative and summative assessment uses: in both cases, teachers need to think about the central question of how does the student performance in the assigned activities provide evidence for the taught skills. The modified framework is called evidence-centered classroom assessment (ECCA).

Assessment Design Cycle

The models of the original ECD are now cast as elements of the ECCA. These elements are arranged in a cycle as in Figure 1 below.


Figure 1. Four Elements of ECCA

In developing assessments and activities the designer goes widdershins around the cycle:

  1. Skill Map — Define the skills to be measured.
  2. Evidence Rubric — Define how to distinguish high and low skill levels from student work.
  3. Activity Template — Define activities to collect the desired evidence as well as ways to vary the activity to change the quality of the evidence.
  4. Assessment Plan — Make a plan to collect all of the evidence needed to cover all of the skills. This is essentially just a lesson plan with extra fields for evidence.

This procedure is iterative; it typically takes several times around the cycle before all of the models play well together.

Assessment Implementation Cycle

The processes of the four process architecture for assessments (Almond, Steinberg, & Mislevy, 2002) exists between the elements of the ECCA. In


Figure 2. ECCA Implementation Cycle

In implementing assessments and activities the teacher goes diesul around the cycle:

  1. Do Activity — The teacher takes the next activity from the plan, and assigns it to the student. If necessary, the teacher can use features of the activity to adjust the difficulty.
  2. Identify Evidence — The teacher applies the evidence rubrics to the student work to identify evidence of the presence (or lack) of skills. These can be used immediately for feedback or sent on to evidence accumulation.
  3. Evidence Accumulation — The teachers accumulates the evidence across several skills to locate the student on the skill map.
  4. Revise Plan — Based on where the students are compared to where they were expected to be, the teacher makes adapts to the plan.

Talk at FERA 2019

This is a talk with James and Russell presented in a dialog format. Slides are here. Here is the video.

Talk at the NCME conference.

Here are the slides Russell used at the 2018 NCME conference on Assessment in the Discipline. And here is a video of the presentation.

Worksheets for the four elements

We have created some worksheets for thinking about the four elements of the ECCA process. James Hernandez has filled out some example using a English Language Arts (ELA) standard based on the use of figurative language. You can download and try these out of your own projects.

Feedback about the templates

Keep watching this space, we expect to have a survey up for giving us feedback on improving the templates.

Old Stuff

I (Russell) gave an early talk about this at AIR. It was long on some mathematical ideas, and short on the actual template designs. I don't have a recording, but for the curious the Slides are available.

RSS Feed

To keep track of new releases, you can follow RSS feed. The link is ECCARSS.


Russell G. Almond, Jeannine Turner, Yoon Jeon Kim, James Hernandez, Peter Kirshmann
Site last updated on 2019-11-21.