Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing: A Status Report

by Nancy Abrams

As I have reported periodically in this column, a joint committee of members of the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education have been working on revising the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. IPMA has a committee which prepares comments for the IPMA President to submit. IPMAAC has a committee which provides input to the IPMA committee. I chair the IPMAAC committee and am a member of the IPMA committee.

In December, IPMA received five draft chapters for review. The chapters were entitled, "Chapter 1: Validity," "Chapter 2: Reliability, Errors of Measurement, and Test Score Information Function," "Chapter 3: Test Development and Revision," "Chapter 4: Scaling, Norming, Standards, and Score Comparability," and "Chapter 6: Test Documents." Since the chapters are only portions of the proposed revised Standards, it is premature to go into the details of their contents, since that may change. It is important to note, however, that the draft validity chapter has adopted construct validity as the fundamental, unifying framework for all validity. While this change has been seen for some time in the literature, it does represent a significant departure from the way we currently define validity. The draft standards no longer speak of the three validation strategies or approaches. In light of this, you may want to read some of the articles which heralded this change, in particular, "Validity of Psychological Assessment" by Samuel Messick in the American Psychologist, September, 1995, p. 741 - 749.

The IPMA committee headed by Arch Pounian has prepared a set of comments. The draft letter of comments was also reviewed by both the IPMA and IPMAAC committee members. The final version of the letter was approved by the IPMA Executive Council at their March meeting and is being sent to the Joint Committee by Wayne Etheridge, IPMA President. Additional detailed comments of the individual IPMA committee members were also enclosed with the letter.

The comments in the letter are generally supportive of the less definitive style of the draft Standards which leave more open to professional judgment. The letter does urge the group to clarify that the Standards are ideals and do not have to be satisfied literally. The comments are also supportive of the new direction taken on validity. Concerns in the area of validation center around a perceived preference for predictive over concurrent validation, the use of the term "bias," the discussion of differential prediction, and the need for a discussion of test utility. The comments in the reliability section concern the need for simplification of the text and the frequent unfeasibility of collection of reliability data for accommodated test formats. In the test development area, the comments focus on the need for broadening the range of assessment measures used in the examples and the need for modification of the discussion of subgroup variance research. Finally, the comments encourage a broadening of the discussion of selection of cut scores.

Obviously the development of these standards is a very long, complex process. We do not expect to see a final version of the Standards for quite a while. I will keep you informed as we receive other chapters for review.

Nancy Abrams is the Chair of the IPMAAC Ad Hoc Committee on APA Standards Revision. Her phone number and address can be found in the listing of committee chairs which appears in this issue of the ACN.