Assessment
Webinar: The Comprehensive Assessment Consortia
Two state consortia—Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium—are hard at work putting ambitious designs in place for new assessment systems. They have released materials and will soon select contractors to build assessments and the infrastructure to support them. What do their current plans look like?
New Survey Shows Demand for Personalized & Adaptive Learning Assessments
The Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) and Grunwald Associates LLC released today "For every child, multiple measures," a study that evaluates parent and teacher support for timely, actionable assessments that monitor individual student performance.
Q&A: Ohio Educators & Students Talk Digital Learning With House Education Committee
Yesterday I joined colleagues from KnowledgeWorks and testified before the Ohio House Education Committee chaired by Gerald Stebelton. They already passed HB153 expanding online options for students in Ohio, but they have work to do as I outlined in my testimony. I followed for very articulate students well served by online and blended schools. The committee asked great questions.
SXSWedu Announces US Secretary of Education as Keynote
"We are excited to have Arne Duncan give a keynote at SXSWedu 2012. His work as the U.S. Secretary of Education, striving for improvements in the quality of learning in America, has a huge impact on the future of education."
MasteryConnect Receives $1 Million to Expand Common Core Efforts
NewSchools Venture Fund announced today that MasteryConnect, an online assessment sharing community around Common Core Standards, received more than $1 million in seed funding to scale the organization and reach of its platform among teachers. NewSchools led the round of funding in support with Learn Capital, Imagine K12 and others.
ETS Advice on Automated Scoring
ETS assessment scientist Randy Bennett recently released seven recommendations on automated scoring. Race to the Top funding of state assessment consortia triggered Dr. Bennett's paper.
The old deal, the new deal, and the metrics
I don’t know about you, but I’m not paying much attention to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) debates in Washington. Â NCLB, flawed as it was, represented a bipartisan commitment to equity and an end to the toleration of chronic failure. Â What’s going on now (this weird local…
Automated Essay Scoring in a High Stakes Environment
Dr. Mark Shermis One of our goals here is to begin to create the data abundance mindset in U.S. K-12–prepping for policies and practices informed by big data surrounding anywhere anytime learning. Â To that end, we like to highlight interesting projects and proposals–and we have a good one…
6 Reasons EdLeaders Should Let Kids Bring Devices to School
Bans on student use of mobile devices exist for some good reasons—kids use them inappropriately at school and there are safety and security concerns. So why bother considering a change?  There are six reasons to consider BYOD. Digital natives learn and live with technology. Most have and bring devices…
Staff Picks: Longer School Days, Steve Jobs, & Assessment
This week, Karen picked an article about long school days, Caroline honored Steve Jobs with an article pick and Sarah highlighted an inspiring article by Wesley Fryer. Tom picked assessment as the hot topic of the week.