To Assess Is to Teach and to Learn: A Three-Volume Blueprint for Assessment as a Catalyst for Learning

We are living through a historic transformation in education. Technology, AI, and policy churn are forcing a reckoning with the limitations of an outmoded assessment system built for an earlier century. As Edmund W. Gordon has warned, assessment must not remain “a grim rite of ranking, but a continuous source of insight and improvement”. Increasingly, the field has the research, methods, examples, and momentum to make that vision real for learners and educators.

The Handbook for Assessment in the Service of Learning—a new, free, three-volume resource created by nearly 90 leading scholars—provides nothing less than a blueprint for that transformation. And the What Readers are Saying… case study that accompanies its release reveals a striking truth: experts across measurement, learning science, technology, philanthropy, and policy share a critical perspective. They argue that assessment, well-designed, has the potential to serve as a powerful lever for human potential.

The Problem: We Are Still Flying Blind

For decades, schools have operated with what practitioners sometimes call an “autopsy model” of assessment—systems that tell us how students performed only after the learning trajectory might be improved. As one analysis notes, most tests return results “long after the point when the information is useful or usable”.

Teachers are left straining to adjust instruction without timely feedback. Policymakers are left making decisions on stale data.

This is not because the Science of Reading or the learning sciences are inadequate. We have the right science, but the wrong system of practical improvement. 

Mississippi’s remarkable literacy gains show what happens when the right system is in place: continuous progress monitoring, real-time instructional adjustments, and immediate support for struggling students.

To help students learn, we need balanced assessment systems designed for learning—systems that illuminate, not obscure; guide, not judge; develop, not merely sort.

The Handbook’s Core Idea: Assessment, Teaching, and Learning Are Inseparable

Across all three volumes, the Handbook advances a fundamental proposition: to assess is, at its best and truest, to teach and to learn. As Volume I frames it, assessment should be grounded in the sciences of learning, measurement, and improvement, integrated tightly with instruction and student development. Volume II provides the novel approaches and validation tools to build systems that improve learning, not just measure it. Volume III offers “existence proofs”—real examples from PBS KIDS games to game-based environments to high-school portfolio tasks—that show what this looks like in practice.

Leading scholars affirm the significance of this shift. Randy Bennett describes the Handbook as “a watershed achievement in the reconceptualization of educational measurement”. Maria Elena Oliveri calls it a reminder that “assessment is not the end of learning—it’s the spark”. And Andrew Ho argues that assessment should “not only enumerate intellective competence but enrich it; not just estimate, but empower; not just reveal, but reinvigorate”.

Taken together, these volumes do more than critique the old system; they articulate a coherent new set of approaches—capable of nurturing curiosity, mastery, confidence, and learning.

Why This Matters Now: The AI Moment

The arrival technology artificial intelligence makes this transformation not only possible, but urgent. AI-enabled platforms, adaptive learning systems, and embedded diagnostics are collapsing the historical boundaries between instruction and assessment. As Marten Roorda notes, “scientific and technological developments allow us to integrate the learning and the assessment processes much further and much smarter… partly supported by advances in artificial intelligence”.

But this opportunity comes with responsibility. The Handbook insists that validity, fairness, and “validity-in-use” remain non-negotiable. It calls for SAFE AI—systems that are Safe, Accountable, Fair, and Effective—ensuring that technology deepens insight without reproducing bias or reducing learners to data points.

Used well, AI can support exactly the kind of responsive, short-cycle insight that great human tutors already provide. Used poorly, it can entrench inequalities. The Handbook provides the guidance to ensure the former.

The Quotes Case Study: A Field Speaking With One Voice

One of the most powerful findings emerging from What Readers are Saying... is the extraordinary consensus across disciplines. Scholars, system leaders, funders, and technologists reaffirm again and again that assessment, reimagined, is essential to equity, opportunity, and human flourishing.

John Q. Easton celebrates the series as “a treasure chest… Teachers will understand their students better, and students will understand and accelerate their learning”. Lindsay Jones urges designers to embed Universal Design principles to “create assessments that can lead to human flourishing” and ensure assessments serve all learners. Frances Messano highlights the practical implications: these volumes point to “an equitable future where evidence is timely, feedback is useful, and success is measured by how well we help students grow”.

Pamela Cantor MD reminds us that Gordon’s vision is both moral and scientific: assessment must be a “tool for equity, growth, and possibility,” rooted in an understanding that potential is shaped by context, relationships, and opportunity, not fixed traits.

Taken together, these perspectives demonstrate that this Handbook is not simply scholarship—it is movement infrastructure.

A Vision Forward: Systems That Truly See Every Learner

Imagine a classroom where assessment is woven into every learning moment. A second-grader plays a PBS KIDS game that captures phonics strategies in real time. Across the room, a student collaborates with an AI reading companion that diagnoses misconceptions and suggests next steps. A teacher reviews a dashboard that highlights who mastered yesterday’s lesson and who needs reteaching. Students track their own progress and feel pride in seeing their growth curves rise week by week.

This is not fantasy. These are the kinds of examples documented in Volume III—examples that show how to assess is, fundamentally, to teach and to learn.

This is the future: balanced assessment systems, practical measures for improvement, data that serve educators, and tools that help every learner become visible, supported, and challenged.

Conclusion: A Moment of Moral and Practical Clarity

The field has long known what to teach. Now, for the first time, it has a coherent blueprint for how to build systems that ensure every learner grows. The Handbook for Assessment in the Service of Learning provides that blueprint. What Readers are Saying... shows that the field is ready to act. As Edmund Gordon writes, “Let us embrace a vision of education where every learner is seen, supported, and challenged.”

If we truly believe in human potential, then Assessment in the Service of Learning is no longer optional.  It is a backbone of the future we owe our children.