Current Research & Development Projects
At Assessment for Good (AFG), we want to provide the right tools for the important decisions that educators make every day. Over the course of the school day, teachers make at least 1500 decisions! Many of those decisions are automatic and based upon information gleaned from lots of sources, including outdated assessment data that comes in too late.
We want teachers to have that information at the speed of teaching and learning.
Explore the Futures of Assessment
Assessment for Good calls for a new system of assessment that leads to greater learning, discovery, and connection. We invite you to explore and see what’s possible when students’ assets become a source of rich information that are combined with high quality learning experiences and the power of AI.
Our Areas of Innovation
Much of assessment interrupts the learning process. Assessment for Good’s R&D surfaces ways we can assess while students are actively learning. Our team is focused on transforming three key areas to shape and improve the future of formative assessment:
Expand Item formats
A student’s learning experience is about more than just mastering subject content. It also involves building skills like confidence, motivation, and self-awareness as they encounter exciting and challenging opportunities, in the classroom, their homes, and in their communities. These skills, alongside content knowledge, factor into how students understand fractions, rational numbers, or early reading. Yet, traditional assessment tools are summative, like unit tests or end-of-year exams, and evaluate whether students have learned enough to advance in their studies using multiple-choice, short-answer, or essay questions that do not mirror how young people learn.
Students experience their world much more fluidly than through predetermined choices or five-paragraph essays–they deserve assessment tools that reflect and honor the dynamic ways they learn. Assessment for Good is committed to exploring common item formats used in summative assessment tools and new item formats such as text-based conversations to go beyond capturing whether an answer is right or wrong. Instead, AFG is working to create asset-based, formative assessment tools that capture the dynamic nature of learning as it happens – not just at the end of a unit or academic year – and the important skills that factor into the process.
Design Game-Based Assessments
Assessment development hasn’t changed much since the latest market-disrupting invention– computers. Besides a shift to online test-taking, assessment periods continue to disrupt learning, have yet to improve learning outcomes for students, and add to the mounting responsibilities piled onto educators. Assessment For Good is working to design formative assessment tools that are learner-focused, not only providing valuable information to educators, but also offering value for the students taking them.
Assessment for Good is testing and designing playful assessment tools that can be quickly accessed and completed by students in class, at home, and in their community. Coined by YJ Kim at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, playful assessment is assessment that seamlessly blends learning and assessment together. AFG is taking a game-based approach similar to a choose-your-own-adventure game and includes short spurts of assessment and opportunities for reflection. It is exactly by interacting with the game-based assessment that students–and their educators, caregivers, and community members–learn about a learner’s strengths, interests, and struggles. By designing assessment in ways that make play and learning indistinguishable and that invite students to want to interact with the tools, Assessment for Good is creating assessment tools that help learners build greater awareness about their skills and strengths, so they can play an active role with teachers in their learning and discovery.
Build Prototypes that Reflect Student Learning
Educators and school leaders overwhelmingly rely on assessment data to inform decisions about the resources and learning opportunities available to students and schools. As such, it is imperative educators and school leaders have assessment tools that provide accurate and relevant data about student skills and learning. To do this, current assessment systems and tools must be modernized to reflect the learning process as much as possible. This begins with research: understanding the new ways students learn and how they stitch information together from what they learn at home, in their community, at school, and through their friends to make sense of the world.
Assessment for Good is researching, developing, and testing assessment prototypes that align with the authentic experience of learning. For example, students can interact with one of the prototypes and play “What Would You Do?”, a game where students are presented with a scenario and asked for advice. They may meet a character that is scared to speak up in class and are asked for advice on how to address the situation. Learners can provide their response in the ways that most align with how they think, such as through a collection of images, a chat-based interface, or a story creator. Then, the system coaches learners through their response, asking them questions, providing feedback, and encouraging them to play the game again. This kind of assessment provides students with a more authentic experience that resembles the learning experiences they encounter inside the classroom and beyond. In this way, students are the source of the expertise, and the assessment prototype simply provides the learner with a variety of ways of sharing their knowledge, interests, and insights and offers prompts to support metacognition and deeper learning.
Get updates
about our work
AERDF R&D Programs
EF+Math improves math outcomes by strengthening executive functioning skills that manage our attention, thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
Assessment for Good aims to transform assessment to deliver accurate, meaningful data that ignites instruction and fosters a more student-centered experience – at the speed of teaching and learning.
Reading Reimagined develops foundational literacy skills in students who need on-going support tailored to their developmental stage.
AugmentED brings together expert teachers, researchers, and technologists to reimagine education for the AI era, developing and testing new teaching approaches and AI-powered tools to nurture every student’s potential.