Linking, Routing and Fairness for Through-Year Assessment

Treats a through-year assessment system (interims during the year feeding a multistage summative) as the unit of analysis. Links interims to the summative scale with a latent multivariate normal model that carries each score's measurement error forward and handles missing interims, estimated by the EM algorithm (Dempster, Laird and Rubin, 1977, ) with SQUAREM acceleration (Varadhan and Roland, 2008, ); simulates cold-start versus prior-informed routing in a two-stage multistage test; checks whether priors disadvantage late enrollers, low scorers or fast growers; and evaluates decision accuracy and consistency of through-year scores against a single summative.