Measurement is a Necessary but not Sufficient Frame for Assessment

摘要

No one field provides a rich enough language for the interpenetrating issues in educational assessment-personal, social, educative, economic, psychological, technological, and statistical among them. Measurement is a semantic frame (Fillmore, 1976), a constellation of relationships and concepts that correspond to recurring patterns in human activity, highlighting typical roles, processes, and viewpoints (e.g., the "commercial event") but not others. We use semantic frames to reason about unique and complex situations-sometimes intuitively, sometimes deliberately. A professional's measurement frame extends to models and methods for capturing and characterizing information about what people know and can do. Professor Haertel (this issue) considers ways the measurement frame, as useful as it is for some aspects of assessment, does not speak to others. He challenges the tacit assumption that the issues it does deal with are nearly separable from the others. I agree. Here are additional frames we need to understand assessment (Mislevy, 2012).