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.
Join us as we step back and address how states can employ lessons from design thinking as they attempt to create innovative assessment systems this year for RILS 2021 virtual conference.
This is the fifth post by one of our 2021 summer interns based on their project and the assessment and accountability issues they are addressing this summer with their Center mentors. Ella Anghel, from Boston College, is working with Nathan Dadey and Will Lorié in examining data from a game-based assessment to determine an approach to summarizing the data to provide useful information to teachers.
This is the fourth post by one of our 2021 summer interns based on their project and the assessment and accountability issues they are addressing this summer with their Center mentors. Sarah Wellberg, from the University of Colorado Boulder, is working with Carla Evans to investigate issues related to the relationship between the use of complex performance assessments and efforts to promote instructional practices that improve student learning.
As we approach 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence regarding the academic impact on students is still relatively scarce; information we have largely comes from interim assessments (e.g., Renaissance STAR or NWEA MAP). Beginning in Fall 2020, several interim assessment vendors leveraged their assessment data to examine the academic impact of the pandemic in the United States.
This is the third post by one of our 2021 summer interns based on their project and the assessment and accountability issues they are addressing this summer with their Center mentors. Sarah Wellberg, from the University of Colorado Boulder, is working with Carla Evans to investigate issues related to the relationship between the use of complex performance assessments and efforts to promote instructional practices that improve student learning.
This is the second post by one of our 2021 summer interns based on their project and the assessment and accountability issues they are addressing this summer with their Center mentors. Dan Silver, from the University of Southern California, is working with Scott Marion on using opportunity-to-learn information to enhance the utility of state test scores and better understand schooling conditions during and after the pandemic.
I was asked recently if the Center was producing assessment recommendations for back-to-school this fall. My first reaction was, “wait, didn’t we already do that?” When my pandemic-induced time fog finally cleared enough, I remembered that we produced a comprehensive set of recommendations with Rebecca Kockler and our colleagues at CCSSO for assessment in fall 2020.
This is the first post by one of our 2021 summer interns based on their project and the assessment and accountability issues they are addressing this summer with their Center mentors. Thao Thu Vo, from Washington State University, is working with Scott Marion on using opportunity-to-learn information to enhance the utility of state test scores.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to subside in the United States, it may be reasonable to expect some education activities to resume with relatively little delay or difficulty. But the impact to other aspects of the education system is likely more extensive, requiring a period of rebuilding before complete resumption. Such is the case with rebuilding school accountability systems statewide.
Why School Accountability Activities Will Resume Incrementally Rather Than Immediately
Held each fall since 1999, the Reidy Interactive Lecture Series (RILS) provides a unique opportunity for a diverse group of participants to step back and discuss timely and important topics in assessment and accountability. For RILS 2021 we will gather to consider how states can employ lessons from design thinking as they attempt to create innovative assessment system design.
Most of us would agree that if the problem of improving K-12 educator assessment literacy has not been solved, it is not because of a lack of trying. A quick search of books with “assessment literacy” in the title, or a more general search for books on formative assessment or classroom assessment, returns many excellent resources written by esteemed researchers, practitioners, and scholars.
The Oklahoma State Department of Education’s (OSDE) highest priority is keeping students and staff safe so that we can focus on learning acceleration for all students. We are also intensely focused on how assessment can be used to help address these instructional and learning needs. To this end, in this post, I discuss the importance of a balanced system of assessment and of being very intentional about the specific purposes and uses of types of assessment within that system, especially those intended to be used to support student learning and improved instruction.
In a previous post I discussed the challenges of rebuilding accountability systems developed for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2021-2022. Prominent among these challenges is missing data due to multiple years of pandemic-related disruptions. What are the best alternatives to solve this problem? In this post I’ll suggest a tool, the performance profile, that may help address the issue of partially missing data.
