There’s a saying in education circles: ‘we treasure what we measure’. A new partnership in the US is testing the inverse: if we change what we measure can we change what we treasure?
Last year, ETS, the nonprofit US testing giant that writes and administers tests like the Graduate Record Exams (GRE) and TOEFL (an English language test), teamed up with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an influential educational nonprofit, to build assessments to capture not just academic disciplines like math and science, but also crucial skills such as collaboration, critical thinking, creativity and communication—skills employers say they want, parents know kids need, and teachers have limited time to teach due to the demands of district and state standards.
