Assessment

This domain defines a model that can be used for a wide variety of assessments, including early childhood assessment, state standardized assessments, college entrance exams, benchmark assessments, and course assessments. This domain contains:

• Learning Standards that drive the curriculum and the assessments
• Assessment Metadata that describe the assessment
• Student Assessment Results that follow a parallel structure of StudentAssessment, StudentObjectiveAssessment, and StudentAssessmentItem

Learning Standards

Many states have standard learning standards that drive the curriculum and the assessments. The Common Core State Standards Initiative (www.corestandards.org) is a national initiative for standards in this area. For states that use the Common Core, or have their own standards, the assessment model has entities for LearningStandard, which represents the lowest level of skills, and LearningObjective, which represents higher level aggregation of skills, as shown below. The model supports a hierarchical taxonomy of learning skills using multiple levels of LearningObjective, which may correspond to levels of subjects, domains, or strands; the Nomenclature attribute captures the appropriate naming of these levels whereas the SuccessCriteria attribute captures the criterion that teacher and students use to check for attainment of the objective.

LearningStandard may also be hierarchically organized to support the use case that adopters of the Common Core often decompose a standard into lower level standards in their curriculum. The HasAssociatedPrerequisite association captures prerequisites for a LearningStandard as would be specified in a learning map.

Assessment Model, Learning Standards

Assessment Metadata

Assessment metadata is information describing the assessment. The model reflects multiple levels of definition, designed to accommodate a wide variety of assessment reporting, as follows:

• The AssessmentFamily is the optional identification for a family of tests. For example, a family of statewide tests might be identified for a set of subject assessments at various grade levels. If required, AssessmentFamilies may be hierarchically organized. Semantically, characteristics of an AssessmentFamily are "inherited" by the individual Assessments.
• There are two mutually exclusive options to associate an Assessment to an educational setting: either by Section or by Program. 

Assessment Model, Assessment Metadata

Student Assessment

The Assessment entity represents a specific administration of an assessment. The required elements on the Assessment entity contain the minimum amount of metadata required to describe an assessment, but the structure is also able to capture robust and detailed metadata structures typically used in K12 education.

• If the assessment is associated with one or more sections, an association is made to the section(s).
• ObjectiveAssessment is the optional identification of portions of the assessment that test specific learning objectives. If required, there can be multiple levels of hierarchical ObjectiveAssessments.
• The AssessmentItem entity supports the optional identification of the individual questions or items on a test to be scored. 
• If the assessment references the Common Core or other state standards (LearningStandards in the model), then the assessment metadata would have a reference to a those entities. If the assessment references its own set of LearningObjectives, then that data would be loaded as assessment metadata. 

The student's assessment results follow a similar structure to the assessment metadata.

• StudentAssessment holds the overall assessment score and other information about a specific student’s results for a specific assessment. The StudentAssessment is associated with a specific student.
• StudentObjectiveAssessment optionally holds the student’s score for individually scored results for a specific LearningObjective. If the assessment metadata includes ObjectiveAssessments, then there would be corresponding StudentObjectiveAssessments for each student.
• StudentAssessmentItem optionally holds the student’s score for individual AssessmentItems. If the assessment metadata includes AssessmentItems, then there would be corresponding StudentAssessmentItems for each student.

Assessment Model, Student Assessment Results

Assessment Model Entities