The Fifteenth Annual Maryland Assessment Conference:

Test Fairness in the New Generation of Large-Scale Assessment

  • Jointly supported by the Maryland State Department of Education and the Maryland Assessment Research Center. 
  • Each topic will be given a one-hour block of time, including a 50-minute presentation by each speaker followed by 10 minutes of Q and A.

Presentation Schedule

Thursday, October 29th, 2015
Time Title Presenter(s)
7:00-8:30
Registration and Breakfast
8:30-8:45 Welcome and Comments Hong Jiao (University of Maryland)
8:45-9:45 Unraveling the paradox of rich performance assessments: A tale of fairness, use cases, generalizability, and situative psychology
 Robert Mislevy (ETS)
9:45-10:45 How to achieve comparability of testing across different modes? Wim van der Linden (Pacific Metrics)
10:45-11:00 Break
11:00-12:00 Test fairness in linear-on-the-fly test Patrick Obregon and Ray Yan (FINRA)
12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:00 Considerations in Making Next Gen Assessment Accessible and Fair Linda Zimmerman and Jan McSorley (Pearson)
2:00-3:00 Redesigning the SAT using principles of fairness and equity Kevin Sweeney, Sherral Miller and Lynn Letukas (College Board)
3:00-3:15 Break
3:15-4:15 Test fairness in large-scale international assessments Matthias von Davier (ETS)
4:15-5:15 Culture in fair assessment practices Edynn Sato (Pearson)

Friday, October 30th, 2015
7:00-8:30 Registration and Breakfast
8:30-9:30 Using Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition to Explore Differential Item Functioning: Application to PISA 2009 Reading Daniel Bolt, Maritza Dowling, Yu-Shan Shih and Wei-Yin Loh (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
9:30-10:30 Differential feature functioning in automated scoring in large-scale assessments Mo Zhang and Neil Dorans (ETS)
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45-11:45 Defining and Challenging Fairness in Tests: Key opportunities in test specifications, standard setting, and score interpretations Karla Egan, Brian Gong and Christy Schneider (Center for Assessment)
11:45-12:00 Closing Comments  Robert Lissitz (University of Maryland)