Chapter 3. Assessment design issues in developing vertical scales for language tests

To support decisions about readiness to take a test in the TOEFL® Family of Assessments, a multi-year project was launched in 2017 to explore the possibility of expressing scores across multiple tests on a single, consistently interpreted scale by applying vertical linking procedures. This chapter focuses on the assessment design aspects of the vertical linking project. It describes the selection of vertical linking items for listening and reading and the development of test forms so that test taker responses could be collected. The chapter also discusses examples of content analysis of the vertical linking items flagged during the statistical analysis described in Chapter 4. The chapter concludes with implications for suites of language proficiency tests regarding the selection of vertical linking items.