Traditional approaches to assessment design tend to focus primarily on surface features of tasks, such as how they are presented to students, or the format in which students are asked to respond. In a construct-centered approach, the selection and development of assessment tasks, as well as the scoring rubrics and criteria, and the modes and style of reporting, are guided by the construct to be assessed and the best ways of eliciting evidence about a student’s proficiency relative to that construct. In a construct-centered approach, the process of assessment design and development is James W. Pellegrino416characterized by the following developmental steps, which are common to both evidence-centered design and construct modeling: • analyzing the cognitive domain that is the target of an assessment, • specifying the constructs to be assessed in language detailed enough to guide task design, • identifying the inferences that the assessment should support, • laying out the type of evidence needed to support those inferences, • designing tasks to collect that evidence, modeling how the evidence can be assembled and used to reach valid conclusions, and • iterating through the above stages to refine the process, especially as new evidence becomes available.Ultimately, the tasks designed in this way should allow students to “show what they know and can do” in a way that is as unambiguous as possible with respect to what the task performance implies about student knowledge and skill—i.e., the inferences about student cognition that are permissible and sustainable from a given set of assessment tasks or items.