Four Metaphors We Need to Understand Assessment

Author: Robert Mislevy     Consulting Editors: James Pellegrino and Lorrie Shepard

Different communities come to assessment with different metaphors dominating their thinking, and are grounded in familiar assessment practices more than on underlying principles. The author of this paper is asked to explore the conceptual foundations of assessment through the lens provided by these four metaphors (evidentiary argument, practice, feedback loop, and measurement) which are used as a ‘technical’ foundation for assessment, intertwined with but distinguishable from social and policy aspects of assessment. VIEW DRAFT