In this quote, Benjamin Wright, an item response theory psychometrician, is saying that a typical standards–referenced test, such as any of the NAEP subject tests, provides a sample of a student’s behavior. The test reveals which questions the student answered right or wrong. Correct or incorrect responses to specific test items, according to Wright, are not what we really care about. What we want to do is to generalize, or make inferences, about the student’s broader universe of skills or knowledge represented by these responses.
So, the problem is exactly what Ben Wright described, going from what we have but do not really want, to what we want but really cannot get easily. And that’s the challenge of inference. Validation is the process that helps us make that inference stronger, to be more confident in saying, “Here is what I have, and here is what it means.” That is the process of validation; validating the inferences.