About this blog

This blog is a space where perspectives on educational assessment are presented. Publications and Reports will be posted on the blog to frame the future of assessment in a way that is responsive to 21st-century learners. We look forward to public discourse and trust our readers will make their perspectives known through comments and feedback on the blog.

The Gordon Commission’s Vision

The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education has been created to investigate and advise on the nature and use of educational testing in the 21st century.

Scholars, policymakers and practitioners who comprise the Commission are identifying critical issues concerning educational measurement, investigating those issues, and developing position and review papers that will inform the Commission’s recommendations for policy and practice in educational measurement. We’re focusing, in particular, on the development of frameworks that will best leverage educational measurement to inform and improve teaching and learning processes, as well as outcomes.

Through its commitment to influence the future of assessment in education, the Commission seeks to stimulate a national conversation on possible relationships between assessment and education. Toward that end, the Commission consults with a wide variety of experts ranging from consumers of tests and test results, to research and development scholars who produce tests and knowledge relevant to assessment, as well as policymakers who determine the broad importance and application of tests.

For the past 50 years, some of us have debated the merits of psychological testing or criticized the limits of extant theories, practices, instruments and procedures. The field of psychometrics has responded with growth in conceptualization, its capacity to serve and the scope of its concerns. Still, the persistent, implicit question has been raised — “What makes you think that scholarship applied to this set of issues will make a difference when such debate has not radically changed the field in 50 years?” Our knowledge base has changed. Our theories have become more complex. Our instrumentation is more sophisticated. But it is the judgment of some that educational measurement has not kept pace with changes in educational policy and practice, and there are many signals indicating that our culture and its demands on education will continue to change.

Some argue that the expectation of such shifts and changes in our beliefs and realities will require us to transform what we do in, through and with education. Educational measurement will need to be responsive to these changed conditions. Some of us believe that assessment in education can inform and influence the nature of the conditions and processes that are the foci of measurement.

Our major tasks are to anticipate how the field of education will respond to these evolving changes and to think about how the field of assessment in education can become adequately responsive to our nation’s future needs and practices in education. We begin with an assumption that assessment in education can inform and improve teaching and learning processes and outcomes.

Edmund W. Gordon Chairman, Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education

Chairman Gordon also is the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology–Emeritus, Yale University, and the Richard March Hoe Professor of Psychology and Education–Emeritus, Teachers College, Columbia University.