We’re committed to helping states and school districts design and implement assessment and accountability systems that support meaningful educational outcomes and student achievement.
We help states and school districts design assessments and assessment systems that meet technical and policy goals to support student learning and for other critical uses.
We’re a leader in designing and implementing accountability systems for states and school districts to meet key federal and state requirements that also support continuous improvement efforts.
State and district leaders are facing multiple concerns in response to widespread and potential long-term school closures due to the growing threat of COVID-19. The concerns are broad and consequential. We launched this page to help you efficiently find the resources you need during these uncertain times.
This is the fourth in a series of seven posts on instructing and assessing 21st Century skills. This post focuses on self-directed learning, one of the four critical 21st Century skills addressed in the series.
In recent weeks, CenterLine has featured several posts by Center associates and guest authors addressing how states, districts, and schools should consider using assessment to support instruction when school begins again in the fall. We are pleased to share this guest post by NWEA’s Patrick Meyer and Gage Kingsbury, psychometric consultant, with their perspective on this important topic.
This is the third in a series of seven posts on instructing and assessing 21st Century skills. This post focuses on complex communication, one of the four critical 21st Century skills addressed in the series.
Over the past few weeks, the country has grappled with how to confront systemic racism and create an anti-racist society. We are pleased to share this guest post by former Center Associate Susan Lyons with her perspective on what the educational assessment and accountability community must do to address those issues in the development and use of educational assessments and accountability systems.
This is the second in a series of seven posts on instructing and assessing 21st Century skills. This post focuses on collaboration, one of the four critical 21st Century skills addressed in the series.
This is the first in a series of seven weekly posts on instructing and assessing 21st Century skills. This post provides background on 21st Century skills, the Center’s recent work in that area, and an overview of the set of seven posts.
In a late April survey by EdWeek, 320 district administrators were asked to indicate the most urgent needs that assessment vendors could help within the wake of COVID-19.
Educational assessment has a naming problem and the latest example of it is the current rhetoric regarding wide-scale use of diagnostic assessment. This is likely true for other fields as well, but it is particularly rampant in education. When my colleagues, Marianne Perie and Brian Gong, and I first wrote about “interim assessment,” we conducted a search for the terms ‘formative, benchmark, predictive’ and several others.
Although so much about the future seems uncertain, we are excited this month to bring a little normalcy into our world by addressing key questions and challenges in educational assessment and accountability through our 2020 summer internship program. This summer, the Center welcomes four advanced doctoral students who will work with the Center’s professionals on projects that will have direct implications for state and national educational policy. Each intern will work with a Center mentor on one major project throughout the summer.
In recent weeks, several CenterLine posts have addressed how states, districts, and schools should consider using assessment to support instruction when school begins again in the fall. We are pleased to share this guest post by Kristen Huff of Curriculum Associates with her perspective on this important topic.
In a past post, I showed the logical conflict that exists for an assessment to claim to provide both end-of-the-year summative evidence and instructionally-useful evidence intended to improve student learning within the year.
There has been a buzz that “through year” or “through course” assessment represents a better way for states to assess than today’s pervasive end of the year summative assessment. However, no through year assessment has yet been implemented statewide with results acknowledged as acceptable for use comparable to end of year summative assessment scores.
Why Has it Been so Difficult to Get a Viable Through Year Assessment?
To answer the question of what 2021 test scores will mean, I start by acknowledging that the interpretation of assessment results is always a process of reasoning from evidence, with some level of uncertainty. As with all things COVID, we expect to have more uncertainty this year, but we still have the tools to examine just how uncertain we are about the meaning of test scores in 2021.
