Concerns over current and future emerging changes in the U.S. education enterprise have led one of the nation’s premier educational psychologists, Professor Edmund W. Gordon (photographed here) of Teachers College at Columbia University, to lead a two-year study group – the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in K-12 Education.
The commission will consider what educational assessment will look like, and what it should be capable of doing now and through the middle of the 21st century, given the possibility that the present-day knowledge and technological bases for educational assessment could be insufficient to meet the changing demands of the education enterprise in the next 40 years.
Comprising more than 20 of the most distinguished scholars in the fields of education sciences, psychometrics, and public policy, and chaired by Dr. Gordon, the commission will try to determine whether future assessments and practices in education should be the same as, or different from, the past and present in terms of:
· Purpose
· Structure and design
· Modes of delivery and scoring
· Uses of instruments and assessment data
· The management and interpretation of assessment, program, and student characteristics and performance data
During year one the commission will explore: what education is expected to become and should be by 2050; what will be the consequent demands on the educational assessment enterprise; and what technical and theoretical solutions to those demands are conceivable.
During year two the commission will turn its attention to the development of specifications for procedures, instrumentation, data management systems and administrative policies and practices that are appropriate to the identified changing demands, as well as the development of policy positions that are responsive to those demands.
The work of this commission is expected to be influential in the area of assessment development and design.
