Best Practices for Examining and Reporting the Social Consequences of Educational Measures

Abstract

Despite general agreement about the importance of test score relevance, utility, and consequences, empirical articles rarely examine or report these facets of validity. The purpose of this special issue of School Psychology was to provide empirical examples that examine the social consequences of educational test score use. The goal was to illustrate best practices in social consequence considerations and encourage future measurement articles to go beyond a basic consideration of psychometric properties. In this overview article, we provide an overview of validity frameworks and their application in education research. We also review the current state of social consequence research and offer recommendations to increase and improve this research in our field. After summarizing the articles and commentaries in the special issue, we conclude by describing a framework for guiding test development and ongoing evaluation from a social consequence perspective