COLLEGE PARK, MD (October, 2015) – The Maryland Assessment Research Center (MARC) will host its fifteenth annual research conference at Riggs Alumni Center on October 29 and 30, 2015. Co-sponsored by the Maryland State Department of Education, this year’s conference will focus on test fairness in the new generation of large-scale assessment.

The conference will open with a presentation by Dr. Robert Mislevy, emeritus professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, entitled “Resolving the Paradox of Rich Performance Tasks with Implications for Fairness.” His presentation will address fairness, use cases, and generalizability of situated performance tasks such as simulation-based tasks in assessing higher-order thinking skills required by the Common Core State Standards.

Throughout the conference, different perspectives in addressing test fairness will be presented by researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a variety of companies and nonprofits – Educational Testing Service (ETS), Pacific Metrics, Pearson, the College Board, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (NCIEA).

Guest speakers will examine a broad array of topics: using innovative formats to assess more challenging standards; the effects of culture and language on test fairness; methods of design, specification, standard setting, score interpretation, and automated scoring that address test fairness and accessibility in the development of Common Core-based tests; and technical aspects of investigating test fairness such as new approaches to differential item functioning analysis, the effect of compromised items, and how to achieve comparability across modes.

“The latest version of Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, released by AERA in 2014, included a new chapter on test fairness,” says MARC director and conference organizer Dr. Hong Jiao. “So this conference is timely in convening measurement experts to provide their insights, new perspectives, and solutions to challenges in addressing test fairness.”

To learn more about the MARC conference, click here.

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Joshua Lavender, Communications Coordinator, at: lavender@umd.edu