Evidence Centered Design: The Contribution of Bob Mislevy in Advancing Validity Theory

Abstract Bob Mislevy's conception of evidence‐centered design (ECD) is one of the major contributions to modern validity theory. Building on prior work in psychometrics, philosophy, legal reasoning, and statistics, ECD is a generative framework developed to support the principled design or redesign and scaling of both existing and emerging assessment practices. This paper provides an overview of the context that Mislevy saw as an opportunity to reimagine assessment design, some of the history of ECD development, including several seminal efforts. I examine some of the impacts of ECD and consider how ECD might evolve in the future.