Interweaving AI, Assessment, and Accountability in Responsive Education
Our Project Seeks to Address...
What are the critical challenges in R&D of educational assessments that AI can help researchers, assessment developers, and education practitioners address?
What R&D is needed to employ AI toward responsive educational assessment?
How might AI increase the responsiveness of classroom and large-scale assessments? If so, how?
How can we best work with those developing innovative AI technology to ensure that these assessment needs are centered throughout all phases of product development?
Interweaving AI, Assessment, and Accountability in Responsive Education,* an initiative led by Menlo Education Research (MenloEDU) in partnership with the Gates Foundation, is responding to these questions by gathering key interested parties across a series of critical in-person and virtual conversations focused on the opportunities afforded by technological advancement and innovation in assessment.
*“Interweaving Assessment” is shorthand used to refer to the broader initiative. All convenings follow the naming convention of “Interweaving Assessment: x.”
In the past 20-30 years, the U.S. K12 education system has seen significant innovation, thanks to more nuanced theories of learning and instructional models from the learning sciences, as well as technological developments and modes of R&D enabled by the technological innovations and data sciences. Unfortunately, educational assessment and accountability systems have struggled to evolve alongside these innovations, largely due to the continued reliance on and use of foundational yet outdated conceptions of fairness, validity, and comparability, among others.
Three central challenges make progress towards improved educational assessment and accountability systems an even more arduous journey:
With the emergence of generative AI tools that hold promise for educational systems, we must address the outdated conceptions of fairness and validity in the context of these new tools and their potential uses.
The organization of professional associations, which tend to center around specific groups or topics, effectively silo conversations and research activities, therefore stifling well-informed and well-designed innovation.
The field itself has seen significant changes within the landscape of key interested parties – and now includes a broader range of content and technology providers who must be integrated into professional conversations.
Interweaving Assessment Contributors
The below lists includes both attendees of Interweaving Assessment convenings, as well as those who have supported the ideation and planning processes of the project.
Interweaving Assessment Facilitation Team
Interweaving Assessment: AI, Accessibility, and Assessment | Convening #1 Participants
About Interweaving Assessment
In response to these challenges, Menlo Education Research (MenloEDU) in partnership with the Gates Foundation, is hosting a series of in-person convenings to bring together key thought leaders, product designers, and researchers across a set of critical conversations about opportunities afforded by technological advancement and innovation in assessment. These convenings are being planned in connection with existing conferences to create an opportunity to eventually fold the convening into these conferences. This supports sustaining the conversation within key educational professional societies. The design of the convening series will be led by a Steering Committee, informed by an extensive listening tour.
The goals of this three-convening series are to:
Engage participants in sustained conversations across key interested parties to advance new approaches, methods, and strategies to support innovation in assessment R&D
Generate key insights among interested groups to identify psychometric topics and technological advancements that have the potential to transform current approaches to assessment and measurement
Identify key opportunities for traction and advancement in the field, and suggestions of how to share these to a broader audience
Convenings
The project will organize three convenings, across which a core working group will build a sequence to address project goals. Each convening will be focused on a topic intended to elicit discussion that will identify important research priorities, technological and methodological bright spots across fields, and recommendations and directions for the field and educational decision makers.
Learnings from each convening will be disseminated via briefs, presentations at conferences, as well as this website.
Interweaving Assessment: AI, Accessibility, and Assessment | Convening #1
Our first convening, Interweaving Assessment: AI, Accessibility, and Assessment, was held July 21st, 2025, in conjunction with UDL-Con: International. This convening was planned by MenloEDU in collaboration with Lindsay Jones, J.D., of CAST, and Dr. Susan Lyons of Lyons Assessment Consulting.
The convening’s focus, AI and accessibility as they pertain to educational assessment, enabled critical conversations around how we as a community might support all students and elevate learner variability as a feature of assessment approaches. Click here to access the Convening Materials.
Following our first convening, our Planning Team prepared a brief that provides a high-level overview of convening activities, outcomes – including R&D Priorities – and next steps. View the brief here.
In addition to this brief, CAST, with support from EdTrust and Knowledge Works, is preparing an additional brief that addresses considerations for policy makers as they manage this rapidly changing environment. The brief will focus on policy implications highlighted by Interweaving Assessment’s work and help respond to the urgent need of policymakers operating within the intersection of AI and Accessibility in education given the rapidly evolving nature of the space. More specifically, the brief will outline the past and present problems we have faced including all learners and highlight the opportunities that emerging technologies create, along with the necessary enabling conditions.The brief will also provide recommendations for further research, and actionable ways that policymakers can support this work within the current legislative frameworks.
Interweaving Assessment: Rethinking Fairness, Bias, and Comparability in the Age of AI | Convening #2
Our second convening, Interweaving Assessment: Rethinking Fairness, Bias and Comparability in the Age of AI, will be held October 30th-31st in Pittsburgh, PA, following NCME’s AIME-Con. This convening is being planned by MenloEDU.
All convenings are invitation only.
Interweaving Assessment: AI and Accountability | Convening #3
Our third convening, Interweaving Assessment: AI and Accountability, will be held next April (2026) in Los Angeles, CA, following the 2026 Annual NCME/AERA Annual Meeting.
All convenings are invitation only.
Get in touch
To ask questions or share any thoughts or comments, please reach out to Natalie at nrambis@menloedu.org
