Which type of student assessment has the scores arranged in a bell curve with the majority of the scores being in the middle?

The correct choice is norm-referenced assessment. This type of assessment evaluates a student's performance in relation to the performance of a group of their peers. In a norm-referenced assessment, scores typically follow a bell curve distribution, where most students tend to score near the average, and fewer students achieve very high or very low scores. This distribution reflects the natural variation in abilities among the students being assessed.

Norm-referenced assessments are useful when determining how an individual student stands in comparison to their classmates, providing insights on relative performance. This approach is often used in standardized testing and helps in identifying students who significantly outperform or underperform compared to their peers.

In contrast, median-referenced assessments would focus primarily on the middle score of a dataset, which does not necessarily indicate how other students are performing comparatively. Criterion-referenced assessments measure a student's performance against a predetermined set of criteria or learning standards, rather than comparing them to peers, so their scores may not follow a bell curve. Traditional-referenced assessments do not have a clear definition in education assessments but may refer to conventional testing methods that could be either norm or criterion-referenced.