Assessments and Innovation in Education

As readers of my newsletter know, I've long seen assessments as one of the biggest barriers to moving toward a future in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their potential in a positive-sum, mastery-based education system. Arthur Vanderveen is CEO of New Meridian, which is helping to redefine assessments that are valid and reliable, bite-sized and can be taken as students learn, and can be aligned to the content on which they're actually working so that they are helpful to students, teachers, and policymakers. As always, you can listen above, watch below, or read the transcript.

Michael Horn:                In my mind, assessment is single-handedly both one of the significant barriers that is holding the education system back but it's also one of the biggest opportunities for innovation that can propel it forward, the learner-centered education system that our students need, our society needs, and so forth.

                        And I would just say as a bit of prelude before I introduce my guest on today's episode, the problem with today's assessments in brief are that they really are a reification, if you will, of today's time-based learning system. In today's system, we offer learning experiences, we test and assess, students make progress to the next unit, the next subject, the next grade level, whatever it might be, and only afterwards do they get the results with very little ability to do anything with that feedback.

                        Or maybe, it's a formative assessment that they get in the context of their learning, but it's not something that really helps with their transparency around their learning. It's often not a high quality assessment of any sort, so they don't really get credit for those sorts of learning experiences in any meaningful way.

                        What's interesting is as a result, assessment often becomes synonymous with an autopsy in our education system. It's just basically a view of what the student did, but not an opportunity to improve their learning, which frankly is a shame. Because in a mastery-based learning model, we would offer learning experiences to students, we'd still do testing and assessment, but that testing and assessment would essentially be almost real time or interactive to inform what a student did next, and only when they truly demonstrated mastery would they move on. It's a very different model for assessments, and it requires a very different model of thinking about validity and reliability and so forth.

                        In that model, assessments could be shorter, they could be more frequent, and they could be both for and of learning. So break this trade-off between that formative and summative by performing both. Our guest today, Arthur Vanderveen, the CEO of New Meridian, knows a heck of a lot more about all of this than do I. He's in my mind helping create these innovations in assessment to really propel the system forward toward this much more learner-centered vision that I have outlined. Arthur, first, welcome to the Future of Education. It is great to see you. I'm excited for you to talk to us, teach us, and correct everything I just messed up about the future of assessments, but thanks so much for being here.

Arthur Vanderveen:     Michael, it's great to see you and a real pleasure to be here with you.

Horn:                So let's just dive right in. Tell us a little bit about your own background, and what is New Meridian?

Vanderveen:     So I've been 25 years working to improve K-12 education in the US, both in the for-profit, non-profit, public sector, private sector, and a few things have animated me over those 25 years. I developed my expertise with assessment when I was at the College Board, and when I led assessments for the New York City Department of Education, where I also had the opportunity to help launch and run the Innovation Zone under then-Chancellor Joel Klein, an interesting intersection because the I Zone was all about how can we develop and support schools in developing more student-centered, personalized learning models? Doing that work while also running all of the assessment programs for New York City Department of Education.

                        So you just hit the nexus of my career passions about how can we make assessments better support innovative, new, more personalized, student-centric learning models?

Horn:                So it's a fascinating background. Again, to my mind, it's maybe the most important topic in education, to think about how we actually move meaningfully forward. I'm curious, just to start with a little bit more history which is No Child Left Behind ushers in the mind of the public at least these high stakes assessments. Arguably, they'd been going on for a decade at least before No Child Left Behind in the States and so forth. Then there's the Common Core, there's SmarterBalanced, PARCC, all these innovations on top of those summative assessments.

                        And then people start to say, "Well, gee, maybe we want a little bit more innovation in this space," but they restrict it to grade level assessments and things like that. I'm just curious where in your mind is the state of state assessments at the moment as you look at the landscape?