Conceptual analysis reveals widespread ambiguity regarding validity in educational and psychological assessment, highlighting three pathways toward professional consensus.
The ability to convey shared meaning with minimal ambiguity is highly desirable for technical terms within disciplines and professions. Unfortunately, there is no widespread professional consensus over the meaning of the word ‘validity’ as it pertains to educational and psychological testing. After illustrating the nature and extent of disagreement, we consider three options for reaching consensus: to eliminate its ambiguity by agreeing a precise technical definition; to embrace its ambiguity by agreeing a catchall lay usage; and to retire ‘validity’ from the testing lexicon.
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Newton et al. (2015) studied this question.
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