Educational Assessment: A Brief History

Educational assessment in the Western world has a long but very irregular history. Two distinct threads are woven together: the first is the variety of settings in which testing itself came to have practical use while the second is the incorporation of increasingly rigorous methods by which to make sense out of the results of that testing. This chapter sets out some of the key developments in each of these two areas, from their origins until the dawn of contemporary psychometrics. For extended periods of time even the simplest improvements in either testing or statistics fought long and hard against tradition and inertia. It took many generations for the two threads to finally merge into a full-fledged science of educational measurement.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Center for Student Testing, Evaluation and Standards, Graduate School of Education, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, USA David L. McArthur PhD

1. David L. McArthur PhD