This chapter provides an overview of the major components of the assessment design. It begins with a brief description of the 2014 NAEP Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment and follows that with a discussion of the types of assessment tasks and items, how they can be used to measure student understanding and skills, how students will respond to these tasks, and how their responses will be monitored and evaluated. In addition, this chapter describes how the assessment should be balanced across the major assessment areas in technology and engineering literacy as well as across the practices. The types of items to be included in the assessment are described, and examples are provided. English language learners and students with disabilities were recognized from the start as an important part of the student population to be included in the 2014 NAEP Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment, and thus were considered as the assessment framework was developed. Concepts of universal design for assessment were considered as one way for the assessment to be more inclusive of all students.
In 2014 the NAEP Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment will be conducted at the national level grade 8. The assessment will include tasks and items sampled from the domain of technology and engineering literacy achievement identified by the intersection of the three major areas of technology and engineering literacy and the crosscutting practices. The assessment will be administered by computer and will be composed of sets of long scenarios, short scenarios, and discrete items. Within each of these types of tasks there will be a variety of selected response items and short and extended constructed response items. Student responses will be measured both directly and, in the scenario-based tasks, through their interactions with simulated tools and their manipulation of components of systems.