Cognition-centered design principles for digital assessment tasks and items

This chapter provides insights and principles from the decades-long cognitive and learning sciences research literature to inform the design of interactive digital assessment tasks and technology-enhanced items. An extensive overview is provided of some well-established cognitively based instructional design principles that have the potential to support the design of digital tasks to be consistent with human cognition and information processing constraints. In addition, considerations are outlined for how to design interactive digital tasks to collect useful process data for making valid inferences about test takers. Take-home conclusions and potential future directions are discussed for both assessment professionals and researchers.