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At Educational Testing Service (Princeton, NJ), current research seeks to adapt technologies and techniques originally developed for intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) to create innovative forms of assessment. This chapter focuses on one such project, working from the dialogue-based instruction of Graesser and colleagues (Graesser, Person & Harter, 2001) to develop a series of “conversation-based assessments”(CBAs). CBAs use dialogues between automated computer agents and test-takers to help measure the level of a construct—knowledge and skill in a particular domain—that a test taker possesses. To date, we have developed prototype CBAs each designed to measure a distinct skill such as science inquiry (Zapata-Rivera, Jackson, Liu, Bertling, Vezzu & Katz, 2014), formulating and justifying arguments (Song, Sparks, Brantley, Jackson, Zapata-Rivera & Oliveri, 2014), and reading, listening, and speaking skills for English language learners (Evanini, So, Tao, Zapata, Luce, Battistini & Wang, 2014).

The assessment, rather than instructional, context for dialogues lead to unique challenges when designing CBAs. To meet these challenges, we have built authoring tools to support the processes of designing and developing automated conversations for assessment purposes. These tools include conversation-space diagrams (Zapata-Rivera et al., 2014), an automated testing tool, and a version of the AutoTutor Script Authoring Tool (Susarla, Adcock, Van Eck, Moreno & Graesser, 2003), which we call the AutoTutor Script Authoring Tool for Assessment (ASATA).