This report summarizes the design and development of an adaptive e‐learning prototype for middle school mathematics for use with both sighted and visually disabled students. Adaptation refers to the system's ability to adjust itself to suit particular characteristics of the learner. The main parts of the report describe the system's theoretical foundation, architecture, models, and adaptive algorithm. We also review approaches for making assessment systems accessible to students with visual disabilities. Finally, we conclude with a summary of upcoming studies in relation to important research questions concerning micro‐ and macroadaptation. Using a design approach like the one described in this report may set a new precedent for environments that adapt to support student learning based on larger sets of incoming abilities and disabilities than have been considered previously.

We describe the item modeling development and evaluation process as applied to a quantitative assessment with high‐stakes outcomes. In addition to expediting the item‐creation process, a model‐based approach may reduce pretesting costs, if the difficulty and discrimination of model‐generated items may be predicted to a predefined level of accuracy. The development and evaluation of item models represents a collaborative effort among content specialists, statisticians, and cognitive scientists. A cycle for developing and revising item models that generate items with more predictable statistics is described. We review the goals of item modeling from different perspectives and recommend a method for structuring families of models that span content and generate items with more predictable psychometric parameters.

Quantitative literacy has been recognized as an important skill in the higher education and workforce communities, focusing on problem solving, reasoning, and real‐world application. As a result, there is a need by various stakeholders in higher education and workforce communities to evaluate whether college students receive sufficient training on quantitative skills throughout their postsecondary education. To determine the key aspects of quantitative literacy, the first part of this report provides a comprehensive review of the existing frameworks and definitions by national and international organizations, higher education institutions, and other key stakeholders. It also examines existing assessments and discusses challenges in assessing quantitative literacy. The second part of this report proposes an approach for developing a next‐generation quantitative literacy assessment in higher education with an operational definition and key assessment considerations. This report has important implications for higher education institutions currently using or planning to develop or adopt assessments of quantitative literacy.

This report makes recommendations for the development of middle-school assessment in mathematics, based on a synthesis of scientific findings in cognitive psychology and mathematics education. The focus is on background research, rather than test specifications or example tasks. Readers interested in early development and pilot efforts associated with the Cognitively Based Assessment of, for, and as Learning (CBAL) project in mathematics (for which this review helped provide a theoretical foundation) should consult Graf, Harris, Marquez, Fife, and Redman (2009).The organization of the report is motivated by the evidence-centered design (ECD) approach to assessment developed by Mislevy and colleagues (e.g., see Mislevy, Steinberg, & Almond, 2003). The first section consists of a broad literature review that characterizes mathematical competency with respect to both content and process. Subsequent sections discuss: how to model mathematical competency at

This study focuses on the relationship between item modeling and evidence‐centered design (ECD); it considers how an appropriately generalized item modeling software tool can support systematic identification and exploitation of task‐model variables, and then examines the feasibility of this goal, using linear‐equation items as a test case. The first half of the study examines task‐model structures for linear equations and their relevance to item difficulty within ECD. The second half of the study presents prototype software, a Model Creator system for pure math items, designed to partially automate the creation of variant item models reflecting different combinations of task‐model variables. The prototype is applied to linear equations but is designed to generalize over a range of pure mathematical content types.