Assessments have the power to shape educational outcomes, but are we really measuring what matters? Ensuring that assessments are fair, inclusive, and meaningful for all students is a growing priority for educators. Bias, whether systemic or unintentional, can affect accuracy and harm students from diverse backgrounds. This requires a critical look at what we evaluate and how, ensuring that the most important skills and knowledge are prioritized.
Educational leaders are addressing these concerns by creating assessments that are not only standardized but also equitable and relevant. Bringing together diverse stakeholders, including assessment creators, teachers, and students, can help design tools that provide a more complete picture of learning.
Recently, EdSurge webinar host Matthew Joseph discussed with education experts the need for assessments to measure what really matters and drive human progress. Webinar panelists included Patrick Kyllonen of ETSECandace Thille Stanford Graduate School of EducationEugene Then JFFLabs and Temple Lovelace Evaluation for good.
EdSurge: How can schools and educational institutions ensure that assessments are equitable and inclusive for all students?
So: Participation is key. In JFFwe focus on coalition development. When discussing consensus and evaluation objectives, it is important to consider who is at the table validating the skills. A more diverse group of stakeholders collaborating around the table improves goal-setting processes and results.
Lovelace: One group I would like to add to this discussion about equity and inclusion in assessments are the assessment creators themselves. We need to consider these issues from the very beginning of the assessment tool.
At Assessment for Good, we review our tools several times and ask if the wording reflects diverse experiences. We use collaborative design to ensure equity and inclusion by understanding students' current experiences and co-creating tools with educators and students that match those experiences.
Kyllonen: Equity is all about opportunity, and assessments can provide unique opportunities to learn. Assessment feedback is key to showing performance and areas for improvement.
Students must know what is being evaluated. There should be no confusion! Otherwise, we are not evaluating properly. Students cannot demonstrate their abilities if they do not know what is being assessed. These issues are addressed in detail in Charting the future of assessments.
What role does assessment play in personalized learning and how can it be used to tailor educational experiences to individual students' needs?
Thille: Personalized learning involves individualizing experiences to support students' goals. We must consider not only the student but all human actors in the system and the decisions they must make to support the student's journey. These actors include mentors and assessment creators. They should be aligned with the goal and have an idea of the student's current state in relation to that goal. This is where assessment is key, as it provides real-time information about the student's changing status throughout the learning process.
As students participate, these activities provide evidence for assessment. The resulting insights can be shared with all stakeholders (instructors, mentors, and learners), allowing them to make informed decisions about the learner's next steps toward their goal.
So: As we deepen learning, we move away from a two-dimensional view based on academic records or degrees. Instead, we capture unique experiences that provide a more holistic view of what we are evaluating and toward what goal.
Students often view assessments as punitive (failing a test can be detrimental) rather than performative. In industries like fitness, assessments measure progress toward goals. How can we use this performance-based assessment approach in education? Assessment practices from other sectors can inform new approaches in education.
How can educators implement innovative assessment practices to improve student learning?
Lovelace: We often ask students to take a break from learning to be tested. The ideal would be to think about how to evaluate them while continue learning, whether individually, in groups or in your community.
In our work, we also look at “power skills,” that is, skills that drive the learning process. Knowing fractions is important, but believing that you are a math student is equally powerful. We need to consider what we assess along with how we assess to provide more complete data to educators.
The speed of the evaluation is also important. As an educator, receiving grades after summer vacation was not helpful. We should innovate to take advantage of emerging technology and retrieve data almost at the speed of teaching and learning. This allows everyone, including the learner, to make the best data-driven decisions possible.
How can assessment data effectively inform educational decisions and support the professional development of educators?
Kyllonen: We can now go beyond traditional methods with rich process data, including student conversation data. Communication and relationship building have always been in the background, but technology allows us to bring them to the forefront. We can analyze conversations and actions in interactive simulations to understand students' thinking.
As technology improves, we will be inundated with information in the classroom. We need to develop process analysis models to understand these conversations and interactions. Facial expressions, for example, can indicate whether a student is sympathetic, frustrated, or happy.
This rich data will improve our understanding of classroom dynamics. It is up to us to take advantage of this and develop systems that can inform teacher professional development and improve student instruction.
Thille: This means disambiguating the signal-to-noise ratio. We face challenges in extracting meaning from early clickstream data due to low signal-to-noise ratios.
One advantage of new technologies is the ability to collect more data. However, this creates greater challenges in identifying patterns within the data that actually represent the signal.
Educators don't just want data: they also want knowledge. And we need to offer information in a way that is viable.
Lovelace: While we can collect more complete data on educational experiences, we must do more to make it truly meaningful to educators, families, and students. We must communicate this data in an understandable way.
Educators don't want more disparate data; they want to understand its immediate importance, how it relates to what they just taught, and possibly receive recommendations for next steps based on their chosen curriculum or current unit. It's great to have technologies that provide more data, but if we can't understand it at the time of teaching and learning, we have more work to do to incorporate it into daily educational practice.
What are some of the most common misconceptions about assessment?
So: A misconception is that evaluation is punitive. As professionals and innovators, we have the opportunity to view assessment tools as non-punitive. Instead of seeing them as sanctions, we can use them to unlock human potential and identify paths to opportunity. This change allows us to leverage people's strengths and support their growth.
Kyllonen: Another misconception is that assessments take time away from learning. Exams can be part of the learning experience, as can games and recitals. In cognitive psychology, we know it as the testing effect. Taking a test can be more powerful for learning than reciting or memorizing. This puts the evaluation in a different light. We must take advantage of evaluation opportunities to take advantage of developing methods, procedures and technologies.
What future trends do you think are emerging in the field of assessment and how should educators prepare for them?
Thille: It's not just about ai in assessment, which we have used for decades. These are new forms of ai, particularly generative ai. We are seeing that generative ai can do well in traditional assessments, and now that students have direct access to these tools, we need to rethink our approach to assessment.
We cannot simply tell students not to use these performance support tools; It's like saying, “You can't use a calculator.” Instead, we should focus on helping people develop skills with these available tools. This changes what we are trying to evaluate.
The big challenge now is figuring out how to use these new capabilities to create interesting assessments and evaluate things that matter. The goal is to use these tools to increase the diversity of voices, not standardize, and provide evidence about what works for whom and under what conditions to support human learning.
