Evidence-Centered Design

Evidence-centered design (ECD) originated from the need for a principled process of assessment design to meet ever-increasing demands for employing various forms of authentic and interactive tasks and for utilizing advances in cognitive science and computer technology to support those types of tasks. An evidence-centered assessment design framework was created by Robert Mislevy, Linda Steinberg, and Russell Almond at the Educational Testing Service during the 1990s. This entry further defines ECD and discusses how it is used.

With ECD in place, assessment designers can shift to an evidence-based approach to assessment, as opposed to a task-centered approach, where they engineer features of tasks to support the chain of inferences explicit from construct to task. The central principle of ECD is that educational assessment is inherently an ...