The development of any assessment should be an iterative and careful process.
Ideally, this process is guided by a well-defined framework (see for example Downing in:
Downing and Haladyna (eds) Handbook of test development, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Mahwah, 2006; Mislevy et al. in On the roles of task model variables in assessment
design (CSE Technical Report 500), Educational Testing Service, Princeton, 1999; AERA
et al. in Standards for educational and psychological testing, AERA, Washington, DC,
2004), but such a framework is not always available when the instrument to be developed
is new or innovative. Frameworks for the development of traditional computer-based tests
have been published and experimented with since the late 1990s, by which time CBT had
already existed for more than a decade. In an earlier empirical pilot study, we described a
new type of assessment for Dutch vocational education, called multimedia-based performance
assessment (MBPA) (self-revealing reference 2014). This CBT uses multiple media
formats and interactive tasks to measure skills that are currently measured by performancebased
assessment. In conducting that pilot study, deficits in the existing literature made it
difficult to ground all developmental steps in sound scientific theory. To remedy those
deficits, this article presents and validates a framework for the design and development of
MBPA, combining a search of the relevant literature from several subfields of educational
assessment and consultation with assessment experts. The framework unites assessment
development and multimedia development theory, focus solely on vocational education,

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• A framework for designing and developing multimediabased performance assessment in vocational education