Two major players in K–12 education launched a joint effort last month to develop new assessments that could help shift schools’ focus away from traditional “seat time” requirements and toward more accurate measures of mastery over academic content.
The new tests, to be created by the Educational Testing Service and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, are meant to usher in competency-based forms of schooling that would allow students to proceed through academic material at their own pace. Leaders of both organizations hope they will also capture a broader array of non-cognitive qualities, like teamwork and relatability, that are highly prized in the modern workforce but undetectable through conventional academic metrics like grade point average or school attendance.
