A Strategy for Evaluating District Developed Assessments for State Accountability

As part of Nebraska's assessment and accountability system, districts' local assessment systems are evaluated for their psychometric quality. This article provides an overview of a two‐stage evaluation strategy, discusses how it was applied in Nebraska, and presents results from the first three years of the evaluation process. Benefits of the method include an emphasis on formative evaluation and promotion of improved assessment quality at the local level. A limitation of the model is the inability to make refined comparisons of student performance across districts on the assessments. Results from the first three years suggest that greater specificity in the review criteria and additional reviewer calibration activities are needed.