Search

There are avoidable obstacles delaying realization of the United Nations’ Sustainability Development Goals (https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/) which have been introduced by the methods used in measuring sustainability impacts and in monitoring progress toward the UN goals. Scientific measurement offers practical advantages based in rigorously defined and meaningful quantitative units that facilitate close management, trust, and efficient communication. Were improved metrics to be incorporated in systems of metrological traceability, legally binding conformity assessments could eventually provide a basis for new sustainability accounting standards, economic models, and the means for tracking returns on investments in sustainability impacts. Toward these ends, there is a need for making access to improved measurement principles, methods, and results much more widely available. That purpose could be served by the BEAR Assessment System Software (BASS), which provides an online environment offering practical tools for instrument development, administration, calibration, and quality improvement; data analysis and measurement; and reporting. Each variety of sustainability stakeholder could make use of the system for their diverse purposes, advancing their unique self-interests further by cooperatively competing with other stakeholder groups than they could working alone.

Assessment for learning aims to improve learning by feeding back information on the attainment of intended learning objectives to students and teachers. In this form of assessment, the student acts as a measuring instrument and learning attainment is the quantity to be measured. Current practices in classroom assessment, unfortunately, often are not grounded and have been focused on total correct scores without reference to the evidence hidden within them concerning the attainment of learning objectives. Our goal in this study is to clarify what assessment for learning is, why it is important, and how it works in a metrologically coherent context of equated assessments administered from calibrated item banks. The main focus lies in how item content can be framed according to intended learning outcomes that are meaningfully interpreted using a construct map. An example involves empirical datasets of 283 secondary three students from two formative tests designed by two science teachers. Coherent formative assessment of this kind applies a scientific model that belongs to the same class metrologists consider as defining measurement. The results illuminate the potential for establishing item banks that enable teachers to more efficiently and effectively assess and improve the attainment of learning objectives across different cohorts of students in a common metric.

Why metrology? What special value does it offer to the design and use of sustainability impact metrics, and so to the realization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals? One answer in short, is, “For justice.” The balance scale is a universal symbol of fairness, development and equality. A second brief reply is, “For efficient markets.” Common currencies for the exchange of value are well known as a key factor in lowering transaction costs and supporting property rights, both essential to market formation. The repeatedly encountered dilemma, of course, is how to design, calibrate, and use measures of economic, environmental, human, and social value that lower costs and are just in more than name alone, serving some but not others. Longer answers justify metrological traceability to consensus unit standards as a key factor in realizing the SDGs by showing how it contributes to (a) the cultivation of shared meanings and improved communication; (b) the grounding of pragmatic expressions of verified trust; (c) making real, reproducible developmental trajectories visible and manageable; and (d) creating the multilevel systems of systems required for managing and governing complex, adaptive, self-organizing forms of social, political, legislative and economic life. A more complete answer to the question, “Why metrology?,” then focuses on how the SDGs’ diverse stakeholder interests may be most effectively fulfilled via collective actions facilitated on the basis of shared values.

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) have been adopted worldwide as a standard practice to enhance teaching and learning quality. However, improvement efforts are threatened by various problems involving ordinal scores and interpretive frameworks restricted to individual item sets and uninformed by a well-defined invariant construct. In this study, an approach to framing SET items according to theory rather than personal or subjective decisions is described. A sample of 920 students from the University of Macau participating in this study provided responses to 42 SET items. Applying a scientific model of measurement, the data collected were analysed and interpreted. Justification between theoretical and measurement analysis informed the creation of a theoretical SET construct map. That map and the associated item hierarchy were used as reference sources for configuring SET reports and recommendations. A new coherent paradigm for SET documentation is proposed for further study.

We have yet to realise reconciliation between metrology in the physical sciences and measurement practices in the social sciences. Here, we build on our previous arguments by proposing a psychometric methodology to support metrology in the social sciences. This will be exemplified in the European EMPIR NeuroMet 15HLT04 project, part of which exploits causal Rasch models, novel construct specification equations, and subsequent improved patient centred cognition measurement in support of healthcare and policy decision-making in Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, the programme’s goal of forming key stakeholder networks, including clinicians, instrument manufactures, biopharma, national and international organisations, will ensure consistent uptake of the new measurement methods.

The field of learning environment research has a 40 year history originating in the USA with the work of Herbert Walberg and Rudolf Moos, who utilised Kurt Lewin's Field Theory. The conception of a learning environment employed in learning environment research has social and psychological aspects with a focus on learning, student achievement, and student attitudes. In 1984, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) special interest group (SIG) on the Study of Learning Environments was formed, and in 1998 the first edition of the Learning Environments Research journal (LERj) was published. This paper examines the features of the survey instruments developed to measure aspects of classrooms and other environments where learning occurs. The traditions of Classical Test Theory, True-Score Theory and Rasch's models for unidimensional measurement are related to learning environment research as reported in the LERj. Measurement theories are associated with three philosophical orientations: positivism, anti-positivism, and post-positivism. The paper concludes with some examples of how a measurement science extending Rasch's models can be applied in learning environment research.

The integrative process of design thinking provides a compelling framework for addressing problems in education involving coherent assessment and instruction. New possibilities for more meaningful developmental coherence within, horizontal coherence across, and vertical coherence between classroom formative and accountability assessments emerge by thinking through and enacting conceptual solutions that begin with the end in mind and that involve end users every step of the way. The nonlinear process involves empathy for students and teachers, the definition of a solvable problem (one with solutions that are feasible, viable, and desirable), the ideation of a brainstormed array of ideal "possibly impossible" resources for creativity (such as a very demanding measurement model and traceability to unit standards), the rapid development of an initial prototype expected to have limitations, and the first of an iterative series of tests that deliberately test the prototype en route to a recycling as needed through any other parts of the process. Applying Design Thinking may lead to new solutions to problems encountered in reconceiving and reconfiguring classrooms as meta-design ecosystem niches of creativity and innovation. An assessment outcome prototype drawn from recent work with teacher/educators that integrates developmental, horizontal, and vertical coherence is presented.

Computer-based, online assessments modelled, designed, and evaluated for adaptively administered invariant measurement are uniquely suited to defining and maintaining traceability to standardized units in education. An assessment of this kind is embedded in the Assessing Data Modeling and Statistical Reasoning (ADM) middle school mathematics curriculum. Diagnostic information about middle school students' learning of statistics and modeling is provided via computer-based formative assessments for seven constructs that comprise a learning progression for statistics and modeling from late elementary through the middle school grades. The seven constructs are: Data Display, Meta-Representational Competence, Conceptions of Statistics, Chance, Modeling Variability, Theory of Measurement, and Informal Inference. The end product is a web-delivered system built with Ruby on Rails for use by curriculum development teams working with classroom teachers in designing, developing, and delivering formative assessments. The online accessible system allows teachers to accurately diagnose students' unique comprehension and learning needs in a common language of real-time assessment, logging, analysis, feedback, and reporting.

The central importance of reading ability in learning makes it the natural place to start in formative and summative assessments in education. The Lexile Framework for Reading constitutes a commercial metrological traceability network linking books, test results, instructional materials, and students in elementary and secondary English and Spanish language reading education in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Australia.

The public and researchers in psychology and the social sciences are largely unaware of the huge resources invested in metrology and standards in science and commerce, for understandable reasons, but with unfortunate consequences. Measurement quality varies widely in fields lacking uniform standards, making it impossible to coordinate local behaviours and decisions in tune with individually observed instrument readings. However, recent developments in reading measurement have effectively instituted metrological traceability methods within elementary and secondary English and Spanish language reading education in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Australia. Given established patterns in the history of science, it may be reasonable to expect that widespread routine reproduction of controlled effects expressed in uniform units in the social sciences may lead to significant developments in theory and practice.

A better understanding of how to characterise human response is essential to improved person-centred care and other situations where human factors are crucial. Challenges to introducing classical metrological concepts such as measurement uncertainty and traceability when characterising Man as a Measurement Instrument include the failure of many statistical tools when applied to ordinal measurement scales and a lack of metrological references in, for instance, healthcare. The present work attempts to link metrological and psychometric (Rasch) characterisation of Man as a Measurement Instrument in a study of elementary tasks, such as counting dots, where one knows independently the expected value because the measurement object (collection of dots) is prepared in advance. The analysis is compared and contrasted with recent approaches to this problem by others, for instance using signal error fidelity.

The concatenation of units of length is widely viewed as the paradigmatic expression of fundamental measurement. Survey, assessment, and test scores in educational and psychological measurement are often interpreted in ways that assume a concatenation of units to have been established, even though these assumptions are rarely stated or tested. A concatenation model for measurement is shown to be equivalent to a Rasch model: any two units of measurement placed end to end must together be of the same length as either one of them added to itself. This additive principle and a concatenation model of measurement together serve as a heuristic guide for organizing two experimental approaches to calibrating instruments for measuring length. The capacity to reproduce the unit of measurement from theory with no need for repeated empirical calibration experiments, as in the geometrical bisection of the line and the resultant halving of the length measure, is highlighted as essential to demonstrating a thorough understanding of the construct.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, scientists appropriated Newton's laws of motion as a model for the conduct of any other field of investigation that would purport to be a science. This early form of a Standard Model eventually informed the basis of analogies for the mathematical expression of phenomena previously studied qualitatively, such as cohesion, affinity, heat, light, electricity, and magnetism. James Clerk Maxwell is known for his repeated use of a formalized version of this method of analogy in lectures, teaching, and the design of experiments. Economists transferring skills learned in physics made use of the Standard Model, especially after Maxwell demonstrated the value of conceiving it in abstract mathematics instead of as a concrete and literal mechanical analogy. Haavelmo's probability approach in econometrics and R. Fisher's Statistical Methods for Research Workers brought a statistical approach to bear on the Standard Model, quietly reversing the perspective of economics and the social sciences relative to that of physics. Where physicists, and Maxwell in particular, intuited scientific method as imposing stringent demands on the quality and interrelations of data, instruments, and theory in the name of inferential and comparative stability, statistical models and methods disconnected theory from data by removing the instrument as an essential component. New possibilities for reconnecting economics and the social sciences to Maxwell's sense of the method of analogy are found in Rasch's probabilistic models for measurement.