Validity: Theoretical Development and Integrated Arguments provides a
historical overview of validity, targeting developments in both the UK
and the US. It explores theoretical notions of validity as well as
pragmatic validation practices and expands the arguments that need to be
attended to in order to document quality.
The authors examine the need to consider, in addition to the
psychometric evidence, which has continued to prevail especially in the
US, other critical sources of quality evidence. They call attention to
principled design and the evidence accumulated from various
departments/groups involved in test design and development. They also
promote the concept of impact by design, which places consequences at
the top of the evidence chain to guide all testing efforts and quality
documentation. They envision validity scholarship to attend to
consequences at the individual, aggregate/group, and larger
educational/organisational/societal levels. Concomitant with this
attention to consequences are considerations of stakeholders and the
tailoring of communication to engage intended groups. Such an approach
yields a more convincing validity argument. The monograph ends by
calling on professionals in the field to publish case studies which
showcase localised validity arguments in practice. Local case studies
represent critical endeavours to illustrate how evidence and arguments
are pulled together to support the quality of a testing programme and
all that it entails.
