Section 25.717  Test Equivalence

a)         The State Board of Education will implement the following procedures to maintain uniformity in the difficulty level of each language proficiency test and each content-area test from test-to-test and from year-to-year. These procedures will conform to the accepted professional standards for test score comparability and equating promulgated by the National Council on Measurement in Education, the American Educational Research Association, and the American Psychological Association as presented in the "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" (2014) published by the American Educational Research Association, 1430 K Street, N.W., Suite 1200, Washington, D.C. 20005. No later amendments to these standards are incorporated by this subsection.

b)         To achieve uniformity of test form difficulty, all test content advisory committees (see Section 25.715) shall be given identical orientation and training sessions throughout each step in test development and in standard setting. As a further measure to maintain test equivalence, when a new test form is produced, new items shall be matched to the items they are replacing in terms of average item difficulty statistics. Following the administration of a new test form, test scores for new test forms shall be made comparable in difficulty with the test scores on the previous test form by statistical test equating.  The method to be used is set forth in Appendix A.

(Source:  Amended at 45 Ill. Reg. 7269, effective June 3, 2021)