Program Design
We Focus on Achieving the Goals of Your Assessment ProgramWe are an educational assessment company. It’s what we do — and we do it well in no small part because of the expertise that our assessment services and program management teams bring to our program design.
Our program design process, informed by more than 40 years of practice, is replicable and process driven. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room in there for our clients’ unique needs, standards, and goals. We build our programs to accommodate configurability where it makes sense and flexibility where it will have the most positive impact.
Expert Planning and Program Management Get the Process Started Right — and Keep the Program on Track
The initial meeting with our program management and assessment services staff lays a foundation for the entire assessment design process. During this critical phase, we become a team — with one shared vision for achieving goals and milestones.
Discipline and Fresh Thinking Keep Our Assessment Services Team at the Forefront of the Industry
Whether building a new assessment or making changes to one that already exists, our highly-credentialed, research-driven assessment services staff infuses excellence, fairness, and quality into every aspect of their work. They champion the use of established best practices and the most promising assessment innovations. They explore ways to develop new item types that offer richer authentic assessment, including performance tasks designed to assess critical thinking and program solving skills. And they are committed to training local educators to contribute to the assessment process, including item writing and review, standard setting, and more .
Our work begins with:
- Defining the scope of the project
- Scheduling deliverables
- Exploring standard setting, the types of items to be included, the way the test will be constructed, and much more, if we’re developing a new assessment
- Introducing the program manager who will serve as the client liaison to the rest of the Questar team and keep everyone up-to-date about progress, deadline, and changes
Program Management services include
- Program management
- Program evaluation
- Project scope and scheduling
- Communication planning

Assessment Services include:
- Item development for English language arts, English language proficiency, mathematics, science, and social studies
- Leadership of item writer workshops for local teachers to help meet clients’ needs for large item banks in a significantly more cost effective and efficient way
- Evaluation of items against the standards of fairness and quality established by the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education
- Test development for large-scale K–8 summative (LSS), alternate (ALT), English language learner (ELL), and end-of-course (EOC) assessments
- Field testing to evaluate item usability and uncover readability and bias issues
- Development of materials for online and paper/pencil tests
- Psychometric services such as calibration, scaling, and equating; standard setting; data forensics analysis; item and scale drift analysis; customized reporting; and more
- Research
- Comparison of customized tests to third-party tests
- Data analysis
- Refinement of assessments — reworking items, redesigning the test structure, and more — to maximize effectiveness