Last week, we enjoyed the opportunity to travel to Little Rock, Arkansas — “enjoyed” because we finally were able to meet some of our not-so-new Pearson colleagues face to face!
But we certainly also enjoyed being able to meet with representatives from Arkansas schools, and from the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education. This occasion was particularly gratifying, as our co-founder Mike Fee started his career as a high school English teacher in Helena, AR.
In front of dozens of educators, alongside those Pearson colleagues, we presented a vision for a dramatic evolution of that rich, diverse state’s assessment — almost a revolution, I suppose: moving from an end-of-year, post-(most)-learning, retrospective summative assessment, to a “through-year” assessment, one given multiple times throughout a school year, thus both informing instruction and meeting accountability requirements.
We’re relatively new to this — new to Pearson, and to the seemingly Byzantine psychometric, technological, and operational world of student assessment. Yet immediately we could see the promise for students, educators, and families — especially if we combine this new approach to testing with easy-to-understand, personalized reporting.
The ostensible purpose of the presentation was to inform educators and policymakers about trends, opportunities, and possibilities in assessment, as they embark on development of a new state test. Of course we’d like to see Arkansas one day deliver a Pearson assessment to its students. But most of all, we told them, we hope that they will “lean in” on student and family reporting. A through-year assessment can provide a robust amount and type of information, revealing not just what a student has learned, but how their learning is progressing through the course of the year. So not to invest in ensuring that families can benefit from that information — not to extract and communicate actionable insights — would be a tremendous waste.
Frankly it’s the low-hanging fruit. Elements like psychometrics, system stability, data security…these are all fundamental, and challenging. But with tools like video reporting technology, available, we can readily turn all of that hard work, and this assessment revolution, into accessible, understandable, actionable insights that every family can use.