This is the second in a series of seven posts on instructing and assessing 21^st Century skills. This post focuses on collaboration, one of the four critical 21^st Century skills addressed in the series.

This is the first in a series of seven weekly posts on instructing and assessing 21^st Century skills. This post provides background on 21^st 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.

Since school closures and remote learning became the norm, I have received emails from school and district leaders relevant to COVID-19 achievement gaps asking some variation of this question:

All states closed their schools in March and suspended or canceled annual state assessments. While the US Department of Education (USED) immediately waived state testing requirements for 2020, some states are contemplating the administration of their summative state assessments next fall; purportedly to help leaders and educators better understand and respond to the impact of school closures on student learning. Although this may seem appealing, these assessments are no better suited to informing instructional decisions than they have been in the past.

Schools have dismissed students to enforce social distancing and have implemented remote learning for the rest of the 2019-20 school year. Learning has probably been more uneven than usual across students, classrooms, grades, schools, districts, and even states, which presents challenges for instructional planning, including planning for fall educational assessment. Selecting an appropriate assessment to inform instruction requires understanding what information you need, and what information the assessment provides

Graduates today, more than ever, will need to navigate the economic shifts resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic by independently resetting goals, adapting quickly, and applying what they’ve learned to solve new and novel problems. Skills such as these are commonly known as the “21st Century skills” and during these changing times, the ability to demonstrate these skills may make the difference between success and failure.