Score Reporting

Score Reporting as Communication

Score reporting is often cast as an act communication. A concern of score report developers and researchers is the clarity of communication and how well stakeholders understand score report content. Research has shown the recipients of score reports often experience difficulty forming accurate interpretations of score scales, score comparisons, score meanings, statistical significance, and measurement error, for example. Therefore, much attention has been given to interpretive guidance and the presentation of key elements of examinee performance.

Another area of attention in score reporting is the needs of stakeholders. Representative educational stakeholders may be engaged early on in the score report development process to identify effective means for conveying the information they need to perform their personal and professional responsibilities. Also of interest may be the motivations stakeholders bring to the communication exchange and what they need to respond effectively to the score report. Stakeholder engagement may be iterative, with multiple versions of score reports being generated, piloted, evaluated, and refined. In consideration of the central role of score reporting within contemporary notions of test validity, educational measurement professionals have suggested evaluation of score reports focus on how users interpret and use the information that is communicated.

Finally, no instance of communication has a neutral effect on the parties involved. With each act of communication, the roles, understandings, motivations, and goals of the involved parties are extended, reaffirmed, clarified, or disrupted. With this perspective in mind, some have argued to view score reporting not just as an event of information transmission, but rather one that is impactful upon the relationship between the score report recipient and the testing agency. In this approach, design and delivery should take into consideration how authority is conveyed by the testing agency (to potentially both good and ill effect), how responsibility for interpreting and acting upon the report is assigned to various players (e.g., teachers and parents), how interpretive guidance acts to sharpen or soften the claims made about the examinee, and simply how the size and placement of report elements implicitly conveys their relative importance within the report. Rather than there being prescriptive guidance in these considerations, sound score report [Page 1480]development will apply the considerations to the particular cultural and contextual aspects of the specific reporting environment.

...