About BEAR
The Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research (BEAR) Center designs and delivers educational assessment instruments, performs research in assessment and psychometrics, and trains graduate students in these areas.
We collaborate with researchers in universities across the United States and abroad to develop software and other resources for constructing, managing, administering, and analyzing assessments.
Featured Projects
The core of our research is development and use of appropriate assessment methods for evaluating students, schools, educational policy, and the reform of educational evaluation away from the use of inappropriate standardized tests.
These are some examples of the projects that we are actively developing:
California Department of Education's Desired Results Developmental Profile (DRDP)
DRDP(2015) suite of assessments are now available for early implementation! The DRDP(2015) assessments are authentic observational assessment tools used throughout California to support the development for children from early infancy through kindergarten. For over 15 years, BEAR Center researchers collaboratively refined the tool to ensure that it is a valid and reliable measurement of development in early childhood. BEAR Center is responsible for the DRDPtech technology system.
Project Aspire - Defining and Assessing Mathematical Knowledge For Teaching Secondary Mathematics
The BEAR Center is collaborating with a team of mathematics education content experts at Arizona State University led by Pat Thompson on this NSF-funded project. The goal of Project Aspire is to develop an instrument that assesses secondary mathematics teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching secondary mathematics.
Assessing Data Modeling and Statistical Reasoning (ADM)
The ADM project aims to develop an assessment system to evaluate elementary and middle school students’ skills and understanding related to data modeling and statistical reasoning.
Our Software
In addition to our research in psychometrics, the BEAR Center is dedicated to the development of software that can facilitate the delivery and analysis of assessments, providing teachers with innovative and useful ways to assess students.
Recent Publications
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The latest volume of Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives (Volume 12, Issue 4, 2014) is now available
- This issue is explores the methodological disagreement concerning causal indicators, discussing wether they are inherently sensitive to interpretational confounding or not.
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Selected presentations by BEAR Center researchers:
News & Events
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Respondent Speed in the Context of Adaptive Testing
Benjamin Domingue, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
Abstract...
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Measuring Hate Speech: Unifying Deep Learning with Item Response Theory
Claudia Natalia von Vacano & Chris Kennedy, D-Lab UC-Berkeley
Overview The hate speech measurement project began in 2017 at UC Berkeley’s D-Lab. Our goal is to apply data science to track changes in hate speech over time and across social media. After two and a half years we are now nearing the completion of a comprehensive, groundbreaking method to measure hate speech with precision while mitigating the influence of human bias.
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Novice Study of Teacher Learning Progressions in Posing, Pausing and Probing Practices: A Multi-Dimensional IRT Analysis
Brent Duckor, Carrie Holmberg with Yidan Zhang
Abstract Research on teachers and teaching has shown that formative assessment can improve student learning more than most instructional practices (Hattie 2009, 2012). A robust body of empirical evidence spanning over two decades indicates that thoughtfully implemented formative assessment practices improve students’ learning, yet little empirical work has been done on teachers’ developmental trajectories with these so-called high-leverage moves.