A Research Platform for Interactive Performance Assessment in Graduate Education. GRE Board Professional Report No. 90-01P.

This report describes development of a new tool for assessment research in graduate education. The tool, the Algebra Assessment System, is based on GIDE, a pre-existing program that diagnostically analyzes complex constructed responses to algebra word problems. The project had three goals. The first goal was to build a generically usable interface for presenting performance tasks and collecting answers in machine-readable form. This program makes the data gathering and analysis process more efficient and permits examinees to respond in the computerized environment in which GRE Program offerings will be delivered. Second, the range of problems scorable by GIDE was increased to demonstrate the feasibility of automatically analyzing complex constructed responses across a broadened domain. Finally, minor faults in GIDE's analysis mechanism were corrected. Together, these improvements constitute a tool that can be used (1) in future research to permit stronger inferences to operational computer-based testing environments and (2) as the basis for an eventual interactive performance assessment prototype for graduate education.