What is Evidence-Centered Design?
The evidence-centered assessment design (ECD) framework was developed at Educational Testing Service by Mislevy, Steinberg, and Almond. The ECD framework explicates the interrelationships among substantive arguments, assessment designs, and operational processes.

What are Large-Scale Assessments?
Large-scale assessments are designed for large groups of examinees, typically numbering in the thousands, and often administered to make high-stakes decisions. In this project, we are focusing on the science part of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments—Series II (MCA-IIs), state tests that help districts measure student progress toward Minnesota's academic standards.

How is ECD Applied in ECDLarge?
The ECDLarge project aims to improve the approach to developing quality assessments of large-scale assessments by combining developments in cognitive psychology with advances in measurement theory and technology.
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Circles of Expertise
ECDLarge brings together research expertise from four outstanding educational organizations:

SRI International,

University of Maryland,

Pearson Educational Measurement,

Minnesota Department of Education
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ECDLarge is supported by is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DRL-0733172 (An Application of Evidence-centered Design in Large Scale Assessment). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

PADI and Evidence-Centered Design
The PADI project was precursor to the ECDLarge project. While the ECD framework explicates the interrelationships among substantive arguments, the PADI project provided higher-level schemas that built on national science standards (ETS’s ECD is content-free), limited statistical models to a family developed by Wilson and his colleagues, and provided supporting software tools for creating assessment designs within this framework.