Foundational Competencies in Educational Measurement

This article presents the consensus of an National Council on Measurement in Education Presidential Task Force on Foundational Competencies in Educational Measurement. Foundational competencies are those that support future development of additional professional and disciplinary competencies. The authors develop a framework for foundational competencies in educational measurement, illustrate how educational measurement programs can help learners develop these competencies, and demonstrate how foundational competencies continue to develop in educational measurement professions. The framework introduces three foundational competency domains: Communication and Collaboration Competencies; Technical, Statistical, and Computational Competencies; and Educational Measurement Competencies. Within the Educational Measurement Competency domain, the authors identify five subdomains: Social, Cultural, Historical, and Political Context; Validity, Validation, and Fairness; Theory and Instrumentation; Precision and Generalization; and Psychometric Modeling.