Valuing Educational Measurement

The community of educational measurement researchers and practitioners has made many positive contributions to education, but has also become complacent and lost the public trust. In this article, reasons for the lack of public trust in educational testing are described, and core values for educational measurement are proposed. Reasons for distrust of educational measurement include hypocritical practices that conflict with our professional standards, a biased and selected presentation of the history of testing, and inattention to social problems associated with educational measurement. The five core values proposed to help educational measurement serve education are: (a) everyone is capable of learning; (b) there are no differences in the capacity to learn across groups defined by race, ethnicity, or sex; (c) all educational tests are fallible to some degree; (d) educational tests can provide valuable information to improve student learning and certify competence; and (e) all uses of educational test scores must be sufficiently justified by validity evidence. The importance of these core values for improving the science and practice of educational measurement to benefit society is discussed.