Building a Productive Trading Zone in Educational Assessment Research and Practice

Markedly diverse viewpoints are in play in many varied contexts, from science to the classroom to the marketplace. Perhaps surprisingly, both divergent dissonances and convergent harmonies are routinely found together in productive real-world systems. The value of generalizable assessment outcomes hinges on their being both innovative and standardized. These apparently opposite tensions can be reconciled in terms of boundary objects, entities shared by different communities that use and view them quite differently. Further, science has long been seen as taking place on a continuum from everyday thinking and acting to formal logic and methods, so it should not be surprising to find this range manifest as well in psychometric research. We describe methods and results in which psychometrically modeled exemplars known as construct maps and Wright maps function as boundary objects and serve as a basis for productive analogies in educational assessment by (a) preserving relational structures, (b) making isomorphic mappings between systems, and (c) facilitating systematicity, understood as mapping systems of higher order relational structures (Nersessian & Chandrasekaran, 2009). In this conceptual context, we present an application of the BEAR Assessment System and its accompanying software, facilitating translations of relational structures across systems in support of practical alliances of teaching, policymaking, assessment and curriculum development, psychometrics, and information technology (IT)