Theme

Achieving quality in assessment: validity and standards

Organisations and individuals working in assessment continually produce, use or research instruments which judge the quality of a process or its final outcome. That process may be the learning outcomes for an individual: what they have learned or the skills that they have. Alternatively, it may be the outcomes for an institution: a school, a programme, or even an education system. For such judgements to be authoritative, the assessment instruments themselves need to have demonstrable quality, but how can this be shown?

The developers of assessments themselves need to have processes that guarantee the quality of the instruments they use and the data they generate. Such a requirement can be through demonstrations of the validity of the inferences drawn those results, or it can arise through setting and meeting standards. Standards themselves can imply either the setting of desirable levels of behaviour or outcomes, or the extent to which they are achieved.

The theme for the 2008 AEA-Europe conference is intended to provide participants with the opportunity:

to discuss and refine the concept of validity
to give demonstrations of the valid use of assessment data
to discuss standards for the development of assessments
to report on the use of assessments to measure the achievement of standards.

Within this framework, papers are invited which explore all aspects of the quality of educational assessment relevant in Europe, but which are related to the broad areas of validity and standards.