EduCon 2.9

Standardized tests measure only a small fraction of the knowledge and skills students need to be successful beyond high school, and yet test scores comprise the overwhelming majority of policy indicators of school quality and educational success. Some of this results from old thinking about what’s worth learning. But it’s also because we have a lot of experience defining and measuring what it means to read and do math. As a result, these assessments are inexpensive and scaleable.

In the No Child Left Behind era, it will be difficult to advance a different set of priorities if we can’t show that they can be assessed reliably and at scale. As educators, we value things like creativity, ownership, collaboration, problem solving, persistence, communication and citizenship. We know that these qualities matter a great deal for students’ long-term success, and many of us have developed strategies to embed them in our approach to assessment. What we know less about is how to aggregate up. How can we design tools, routines, or technologies to provide valid and useful information about student progress in domains that are traditionally hard to measure?

That’s what we’ll focus on in this conversation. Our goals are to share what we know about what is already out there, and generate new ideas that we can take back to our schools and classrooms to field test.