Assessment. Accountability.
Two powerful ways to support student learning.
Our Commitment: Helping states and districts improve learning for all students
We provide the technical, policy, and practical expertise to help you build systems that yield insight into student learning and schools and support their improvement.
Assessment
Design for every student: We are national leaders in assessment design for all students, including students with significant cognitive disabilities and English language learners. We help your students experience the most valid, reliable, and fair assessments possible.
Our assessment work includes:
- Helping you identify your highest-priority test uses
- Outlining a theory of action
- Designing systems that meet your needs, ranging from formative strategies and curriculum-embedded tests to performance assessment systems and/or large-scale summative assessments
- Supporting RFP writing to help you identify quality assessment contractors
- Generating policy recommendations, such as statutory changes necessary to support the proposed assessment design
- Monitoring ongoing system quality, which may include reviewing and equating scores, analyzing the impact of testing or learning disruptions, preparing for peer-review audits, and leading technical evaluations
Accountability
Design for better student achievement: Accountability systems, when thoughtfully designed and implemented, should help incentivize productive educational actions and minimize negative consequences. We work with states to plan, implement and evaluate accountability systems that reflect their unique needs, values and contexts.
Our accountability work includes:
- Clarifying policy and legislative goals
- Creating credible theories of action
- Documenting the program’s assumptions, rules, and technical quality
- Evaluating systems for effectiveness, legal compliance, innovative approaches, adherence to best practices, and technical accuracy
In more than 80 projects nationwide, we support our partners by:
- Providing technical, policy, and practical advice
- Facilitating assessment and accountability design initiatives
- Coordinating and leading technical and policy advisory committees
- Communicating effectively to a range of audiences about assessment and accountability issues
- Hosting conferences and other convenings to disseminate important new understandings
Key features make the Center’s work distinctive .
Connecting Technical, Practical and Policy Knowledge
It’s not enough to design good assessment or accountability systems. Our experts are well-versed in the dynamics that influence the effectiveness of these systems and we use that knowledge to guide you from design through implementation.
Marrying Expertise with Context
We don’t have a canned model; We immerse ourselves in the specifics of your local context and tailor our work to suit it.
Building Long-Term Relationships
We are not a quick-fix organization. We help you solve immediate technical problems, but we build long-term relationships to help you proactively deal with issues before they become problems.
Sharing Our Knowledge
We are firmly committed to an open-access ethic. We believe in sharing everything we’re learning in order to advance the goals of public education.
Our Mission
We aim to improve student learning by partnering with education leaders to create and support high-quality assessment and accountability systems.
Our Values
at Center for Assessment
Equity
Advancing systems that support all students
Integrity
Working ethically and honestly
Collaboration
Partnering through mutual responsibility
Evidence
Grounding strategies in research
Impact
Generating and sharing transformative results
Banner photo courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education