Computational Psychometrics in Support of Collaborative Educational Assessments

The rapidly growing literature on teamwork and collaborative problem solving suggests that these skills are becoming increasingly important in today’s education and workforce. This special issue of Journal of Educational Measurement seeks to channel the contributors’ expertise toward advances in the measurement and assessment of cognitive and noncognitive skills of individuals and teams in education. The articles in this special issue discuss the challenges and opportunities for developing collaborative assessments that cover the assessment of collaborative skills, of collaborative problem solving skills, and/or the assessment of cognitive skills through collaborative problem solving tasks. These articles combine collaborative assessment methods with advanced psychometrics techniques, such as computational psychometrics, for analyzing collaborative behavior in educational assessments; they introduce the recent progress on innovative ways of studying collaboration in education. Recent developments indicate that society is interested in redesigning educational assessments and not merely improving the assessments we have. Educators request assessments that reflect the way people actually teach, learn, and work. There is a renewed interest in performance assessments and efforts are being made to develop these complex assessments in virtual settings. One type of performance task is the collaborative task, where an individual works together with one or more agents to solve a problem. This ubiquitous interactive setting of our everyday life poses challenges for assessment. Questions about which skills are needed in such a context, how to disentangle the individual contributions from the team contribution, and what types of models could help us predict a successful performance have tempered the enthusiasm around pursuing the development of educational assessments with collaborative components. Nevertheless, other recent events indicate that progress is being made. For example, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 administered a test of collaborative skills (OECD, 2013); the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) hosted a symposium on collaborative problem solving (CPS) in September, 2014, and as a follow-up, the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCES) commissioned a white paper on the considerations for introduction of the CPS in NAEP; the College Board’s Advanced Placement Computer Science Assessment is being redesigned and one of the new features is introducing collaborative tasks; Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the Army Research Institute co-hosted a working meeting, Innovative Assessment of Collaboration, November 3–4, 2014, and an edited interdisciplinary volume based on that meeting is being published with Springer Verlag (von Davier, Zhu, & Kyllonen, 2017); the Smarter Balance Consortium developed an assessment system where performance tasks, including