Curriculum-based assessment (CBA) emerged in the 1970s and early 1980s as a novel approach to formative assessment and evaluation. This entry discusses the development of CBA, the two paradigms for CBA, and the four different methods of CBA that fall within those paradigms. CBA was developed for use by teachers to guide educational decisions related to the selection and use of curriculum materials and instructional procedures. Because of its foundation in relevant educational practice, CBA can be a highly useful tool in student evaluation and instructional decisions within a problem-solving framework.

CBA is a collection of assessment and evaluation techniques to test student performance using materials sampled from or based on the local curriculum. CBA was designed to be more instructionally relevant to educators than published ...