An Educational Measurement Perspective on Dealing with Uncertainty and Bias in Classroom Formative Assessment

This article describes what educational measurement can contribute to the theory and practice of classroom formative assessment. Three contributions are highlighted. The first contribution, assessment as evidentiary reasoning, serves as the conceptual frame within which the other two contributions are elaborated. Those contributions are (1) uncertainty and strategies for its reduction and (2) bias with a focus on approaches to facilitating fairness. The foundational concept running through all three contributions is that of inference as to what students know and can do at a given time, the basis for taking next instructional steps. Such inferences may be strengthened when response consistency is observed across problem variations generated by the teacher or by the teacher in partnership with Large Language Models (LLMs).