Ensuring High-Quality Assessment
With more than 30 years of expertise in assessment, WestEd helps educators and administrators understand how high-quality assessments are designed, developed, scored, and how to best use the results.
We have experience in K-2 and 3-12 assessment. We specialize in innovative assessment solutions designed for ALL learners.
As new methods and formats for assessment continually emerge, our team can collaborate with you to ensure today’s curriculum and assessment solutions are high-quality, accurate, reliable, and valid.
Our team can work with you to address one or all of the following components of designing comprehensive assessment solutions:
Assessment
Framework
Define the purpose of your assessment. Develop content specifications, test blueprints, test designs, and score reports that align with the purpose of your assessment; create test content; conduct field tests and item analyses; and produce final forms.
Performance-Level
Descriptors
Craft performance level descriptors that support the standard setting process while helping educators understand student performance relative to content, standard, and grade indicators.
Score Report
Design & Evaluation
Design report formats that translate data into actionable insights and iteratively evaluate reports with interest holders.
Item
Development
Building from the purpose for an assessment and the standards and content to be assessed, develop assessment content and/or facilitate item writing and review to ensure items are fair and measure what students know and can do.
Item Analysis
& Scaling
Conduct item analysis and scaling to produce results and reports that are valid and reliable, including independent replication.
Standard
Setting
Design and implement standard setting methods to help establish meaningful performance levels for teachers and students.
Alignment
Studies
Conduct alignment studies to evaluate how accurately assessments address the depth and breadth of content standards.
Validity &
Reliability Studies
Provide psychometric services, including research, to establish validity and reliability evidence to meet state or other requirements.
K–2 Assessment Systems Enable Early Intervention to Foster Student Success
Across the United States, statewide assessments in English language arts and mathematics are federally mandated each school year in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. Missing nationwide, however, is any systematic state-level attempt to evaluate students’ ongoing progress in grades K–2, the grades that lay the foundation for all later learning.
Download a paper that presents research and explores best practices to help districts and schools effectively build K–2 assessment systems that support academic success for their youngest students.