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A primary goal of standards-based statewide achievement tests is to classify students into achievement levels that enable valid inferences about student content area knowledge and skill. Explicating how knowledge and skills are expected to differ in complexity in achievement level descriptors, and how that complexity is related to empirical item difficulty--at the beginning of assessment design, rather than at the end--is critical to those inferences. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether sources of knowledge and skill descriptions that are commonly found in achievement-level descriptors relate to item complexity and difficulty. Implications of findings for using achievement-level descriptors as a method of interpreting test scores and for test design are discussed. (Contains 11 tables.)

Alternate assessments of modified academic achievement standards (AA-MAS) must be designed, developed, implemented, and validated following the same rigorous principles and procedures used for other assessments. However, the uniqueness and unfamiliarity of the target population for these assessments requires innovative thinking, especially in regard to writing relevant performance level descriptors (PLDs) and setting appropriate achievement standards. In this article we discuss considerations for (a) likely designs of AA-MAS; (b) the writing of PLDs that are relevant to the target examinee population for these assessments; and (c) standard setting methods that would be appropriate for these assessment designs, as well as special considerations relevant to those standard setting methods. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure and 5 footnotes.)