Designing and Evaluating Reporting Systems in the Context of New Assessments.

The effective communication of assessment results to the intended audience is an important issue that has implications for accomplishing the goals of an assessment. New assessments can provide score report users with a variety of additional evidence about the test taker’s knowledge, skills, and abilities, than has been possible with traditional assessments. Two audience-specific score reporting systems for highly interactive assessments are currently being developed to provide formative feedback for teachers. The first system provides formative feedback to preservice teachers based on their performance teaching a group of virtual student avatars in a simulated classroom. The second system provides teachers with information relevant to how students interact with a conversation-based assessment. These two score reporting systems provide us with good examples of the types of communication and interaction issues that are present in the development of new types of assessments. In this paper, we describe these two reporting systems, discuss commonalities between the two systems particularly focusing on the design and evaluation processes, and elaborate on the implications for future work in this area.