Balanced Assessment: Why It Works + How to Build It

Carlo leads product development for Formative, Newsela’s assessment and instruction product. He began his career in assessment in the KIPP Network of charter schools, where he worked with school leaders across multiple networks on the systems they used implementing a balanced assessment system and ensuring that educators had access to the data they needed. After KIPP, he jumped into the edtech world to work with districts like DPSK12 and Fulton County on their implementation of assessment products. He eventually made is way in to product out of a desire to build better and better tools that support students, teachers, and admins and providing actionable, real time, insights to all.

Scott Marion, Ph.D., is a principal learning associate at the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. He is a national leader in conceptualizing and designing innovative and balanced assessment systems to support instructional and other critical uses. He has also led extensive work across the country to design and implement school accountability systems. His current projects include supporting states and districts in designing and implementing assessment and accountability initiatives, providing technically defensible policy guidance, and implementing high-quality, locally designed performance-based assessments.

Scott is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and is one of three measurement specialists on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress. He coordinates and/or serves on 10 state or district technical advisory committees for assessment and accountability. He has served on multiple National Research Council committees, including those that provided guidance for next-generation science assessments, investigated the issues and challenges of incorporating value-added measures in educational accountability systems, and outlined best practices in state assessment systems.

Scott is a co-author of the validity chapter in the 5th edition of Educational Measurement, a co-editor of the National Academy of Education’s Reimagining Balanced Assessment, and a co-author of Instructionally Useful Assessment. He has published dozens of articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and he regularly presents his work at the national conferences of the American Educational Research Association, the National Council on Measurement in Education, and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Scott earned a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder with a concentration in measurement and evaluation.