Assessment Providers - Data Model

Owned by Eric Jansson
Last updated: Mar 27, 2024 by Shawn Peterson (Unlicensed)
2 min read

Key Concepts

There are three main kinds of data covered in the Ed-Fi Assessment API: metadata on the assessment instrument, student results, and learning competency alignment information.

Main Entities

The Ed-Fi assessment data model covers data related to student outcomes and interactions with assessment instruments. There are three main kinds of data captured in the model:

  1. Assessment metadata - Data related to the assessment instrument itself - i.e. its title, version, questions, scores to expect, etc.
  2. Student results - data related to a student's interaction with an assessment instrument - e.g. which student, the scores, individual responses, accommodations, dates and times, etc.
  3. Learning competency metadata - data that indexes the assessment instrument to curricular expectations, such as academic learning standards published by a state, or sequence and objectives relating to an individual school district

These are the core entities of the model, and they correspond to API resources

EntityContains?Definition
AssessmentAssessment metadataRepresents a tool, instrument, process, or exhibition composed of a systematic sampling of behavior for measuring a student's competence, knowledge, skills, or behavior.
ObjectiveAssessmentAssessment metadataRepresents subtests that assess specific learning objectives. These might be "strands" but they might be other groupings.
AssessmentItemAssessment metadataRepresents one of many single measures that make up an assessment. Typically these are the individual questions that students respond to.
StudentAssessmentStudent resultsRepresents the analysis or scoring of a student's response on an assessment. This will contain the scores for all elements included in the Assessment (if they exist) including ObjeciveAssessments and Assessmentitems; these are the sub-objects StudentObjectiveAssessment and StudentAssessmentItem (not API resource, but you will see them in the JSON)
LearningObjectiveCurricular metadataRepresents identified learning objectives for courses of study in specific grades.
LearningStandardCurricular metadataA precise statement of the expectation of a student's proficiency, typically defined by a curriculum standards body, such as a state education agency.

There are a few other concepts that are important in the model and will be covered below. 

Let's look at a sample score report and how those elements would map into the model.

Assessment Domain - Sample Mapping

Key Topics

From here, we will go into key topics - you can explore these below. We recommend going through these in order, but feel free to skip ahead if you understand the topic.