#342 – Skills for the Future: Carnegie and ETS’s Vision for the Future of Assessment, with Danielle Eisenberg

Danielle Eisenberg, Chief of Assessment Design and Integration at ETS, joins us for this episode to discuss the future of assessment. She talks in depth about the Skills for the Future Initiative, a joint undertaking between ETS and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. These two well-known leaders in assessment are collaborating to create improved methods of documenting and assessing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to succeed in the 21st century, acknowledging that these are not singularly demonstrated through time in the classroom.

It is time for a seismic shift in education that puts the focus on skills. And not just cognitive skills accounted for in curriculum written for 20th-century skills and work, but the rich tapestry of skills that enable individuals to thrive in the 21st century. This is a fundamental paradigm shift from time-based to skill-based units of learning. Smarter assessments are the key to unlock the future.

Amit Sevak, President and CEO of ETS

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• Accelerate Learning With Meaningful, Targeted Assessment (article)
• Assessment as Revelation, with Dr. Kelly Camak Niccolls (podcast episode)
• Personalize: Meeting the Needs of All Learners, with Eric Sheninger and Nicki Slaugh (podcast episode)
• Design Assessments Students Will Want to Do (article)
• Mastery Learning, with Jon Bergmann (podcast episode)
• The Shift to Student-Led: UDL and Blended Learning, with Dr. Katie Novak (podcast episode)
• Save Time With AI as a Teaching Assistant (article)
• Project-Based Learning, with A.J. Juliani (podcast episode)
• Engage Students Through Project-Based Learning (article)

Reimagining Assessment

There were important reasons for the creation of the Carnegie unit and standardized testing. They were intended to provide equity to the education system and make sure that student experiences were equivalent across institutions and districts. However, as Danielle Eisenberg says, “There’s been a lot of unintended consequences for a lot of students.”

The world has also continued to evolve since the initiation of current assessment systems. Danielle points out, “It’s become increasingly clear that the knowledge, and the skills, and the dispositions that are needed to succeed in the 21st century aren’t singularly demonstrated through time in the classroom, and yet, we’re stuck in that system now that equates time with learning.” Because of this, ETS and Carnegie are teaming up to develop a new system that can carry schools and learners into the future. The following are a few highlights from this episode:

• About Our Guest: Danielle Eisenberg is Chief of Assessment Design and Integration at ETS.
• ETS: ETS is “the grandfather of the standardized test,” and they have had a long history with tests like the SAT, GRE, and Praxis.
• Carnegie Foundation: Carnegie developed the current system for measuring student progress: the Carnegie unit, or credit hour. Danielle explains, “It’s the way that the vast majority of high schools and colleges are organized today, and it shapes the daily work of teachers and professors, and it’s why bells ring between classes, and it really largely determines what we count as learning.”
• Skills for the Future Initiative: The Skills for the Future Initiative, a partnership between ETS and Carnegie, is working to develop the future of assessment. Danielle says, “We need to think really deeply about how to measure new things, how to do that in new ways, and then how to use that to provide actionable insights about the development and acquisition of skills in a way that hopefully drives real-time support but also increases student agency over their own pathways.”
• Short-Term Goals: Danielle says, “In the short term, we’re focused on developing, piloting, and scaling a new suite of tools, hopefully to millions of students, that will provide new thinking about what skilled learners need and also provide innovation in how skills and knowledge are measured.”
• Long-Term Goals: Danielle shares, “Our 10-year goal is that every person—every person—has a living record of their lifelong pursuit of knowledge and skills that can be used to unlock upward mobility and drive access to more opportunities. We think if we could crack that, which is a really big challenge, that we could fundamentally change an individual’s experience in three sectors: K–12, higher ed, and the labor market.”
• Identifying Skills to Assess: The first year of the initiative has included extensive research about existing skills frameworks, both nationally and internationally. Efforts were made to answer the question, “Which ones are most predictive of the outcomes in life that we care about for kids?” The initial skills to be targeted include collaboration, critical thinking, and communication. Danielle says, “Those rose to the top largely because they are ubiquitous across almost any framework.”
• A Different Kind of Assessment: “We’re not building a sit-and-take assessment that happens at this one singular point in time and then has very high stakes associated with what happens there,” says Danielle. “We’re really thinking about a suite of tools that we’re hoping people engage with over and over in different ways that allows for a multisource evidence capture.”
• Beyond the Classroom: The hope for the new assessment tool is that it will provide ways to capture student performance outside of the classroom in spaces ranging from family settings to jobs to extracurriculars. This will be paired with tools to allow students to asynchronously practice skills and get feedback on their progress.
• State Partners: Five states have joined as codesigners in this project: North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Rhode Island. The variety of states is helping to provide multiple perspectives and diverse insights in order to create the best program possible.
• Work With AVID: Danielle says, “We’re also really excited about our emerging work with AVID.” The AVID Elective is a unique space where students are developing the durable skills that ETS and Carnegie hope to capture and measure.
• Future Goals: Danielle says, “We hope that the product 3 to 5 years from now . . . is in the majority of high schools in the country . . . and providing the leading, trusted development and measurement platform for the way schools help ensure students are building not just content knowledge they need but also the holistic set of skills to pursue the path of their dreams.”
• AI Integration: Danielle admits that this undertaking may not have been possible before AI. She says, “Over time, we think we’re going to be able to help scale the work of performance-based education by using AI to help facilitate—not replace, but facilitate—some of the educator grading because that’s a lot of effort to grade authentic student work, and performance tasks, and complicated projects.”