For the past few decades, there’s been a push in education to move beyond standardized testing. Yet many agencies continue to rely heavily on annual testing to measure student learning, even as educators and policymakers look for ways to capture a fuller picture of what students know and can do.
A few years ago, my colleague Ken Koedinger and I launched the Enhance Fellows program to help address that gap. The program places talented professionals with expertise spanning computer science, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and the learning sciences in state agencies for two-year periods.
Working alongside state education agencies, fellows develop and evaluate ways of measuring student learning that go beyond a single standardized test, including performance tasks, portfolios, and other measures.
What Rethinking Assessment Looks Like In Practice
Our team has seen that this sort of work can have a tremendous impact. In Montana, for example, an Enhance fellow supported a two-year effort to evaluate the state’s through-year assessment system, which uses shorter, standards-aligned tests across three testing windows instead of a single end-of-year exam. Surveys found that 69% preferred several smaller tests, while roughly 79% said they believed they learned more when testing was spread throughout the year.
The Montana effort is just one example of what becomes possible when states have access to specialized expertise and the capacity to study how new approaches work in practice.
We started the Enhance Fellows program in 2022. It was a group effort. We had smart funders, including Kumar Garg who was then at Schmidt Futures and Ed Hui and Danielle Eisenberg at the Walton Family Foundation. And special thanks to Ulrich Boser, who helped in the early stages.
By 2025, four highly accomplished fellows brought deep expertise to this work across seven states. At Carnegie Mellon University, Michael Asher investigated the impact, scalability, and pain points of curriculum-aligned through-course assessments in Louisiana. Shuyuan Li, partnering with Education Analytics, worked with South Carolina to examine interim and benchmark assessment usage and with the CORE Districts in California to improve and validate measures of students’ social-emotional learning. Nikki Holland partnered with UMass and the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA) to build school-wide performance assessment systems centered on student work portfolios. Meanwhile, Jonathan Downey worked alongside New Meridian to bring quantitative methods and measurement validity to through-year assessment models across New Mexico, Louisiana, and Montana.
The partnerships with state agencies were just as important as the fellows themselves. By working from within these systems, fellows brought specialized expertise in assessment, learning science, and data analysis that can be difficult for states to access on their own. Just as importantly, they were able to apply that expertise to questions states were already grappling with and feed the resulting evidence back into decisions about policy and practice.
That points to a simple thesis: expert talent can go a long way when it is embedded in state education systems, particularly in an area as entrenched as assessment.
The partnerships with state agencies were just as important as the fellows themselves. By working from within these systems, fellows brought specialized expertise in assessment, learning science, and data analysis that can be difficult for states to access on their own.
What the Evidence Shows
Looking across these efforts, the outcomes point to a clearer path forward for education. When states have the capacity to study new approaches rigorously, the impact reaches well beyond test scores. Alternative assessment models provide a clearer, more accurate measure of every learner’s true understanding by reducing background-knowledge emphasis, while in places like Montana, students consistently reported feeling that they learned more when testing was spread throughout the year.
Crucially, this work also demonstrates the value of disciplined decision-making. Rigorous evaluation gives leaders the clarity needed not only to support successful innovations, but also to recognize when an approach cannot scale, ensuring that education reform remains grounded in evidence rather than guesswork.
Looking across these efforts, the outcomes point to a clearer path forward for education. When states have the capacity to study new approaches rigorously, the impact reaches well beyond test scores.
Different Paths To Change
Looking forward, states continue to push beyond traditional testing, but adoption is at a different point on the curve for each. MCIEA is building toward a state policy decision. Montana is deepening an adoption already made. The two Education Analytics studies show already-adopted tools being used more precisely rather than newly taken up. The two Louisiana efforts represent adoption paths that didn’t scale for different reasons: one a considered decision after strong evidence, the other an evidence system too thin to support a clear conclusion. New Mexico is earlier still, gathering stakeholder input before any adoption question is even posed.
Using Evidence To Guide Decisions
What connects these efforts is a shared discipline: generating rigorous evidence and feeding it back into decisions. That pipeline, from evidence to decision, is the core return of this body of work. Ultimately, these efforts provide states with the expertise, evidence, and capacity they need to understand whether new approaches work, for whom, and under what conditions — ensuring that assessment reform is anchored in rigorous local evidence and sustainable institutional capability.
