The Advanced Education Research & Development Fund has announced a fund of up to $40 million in support of efforts to accelerate progress against challenges in pre-K-12 education that disproportionately impact Black and Latino students and those experiencing poverty.

Assessment for Good is the second initiative of AERDF, which was launched in 2018 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with the aim of supporting improved outcomes in student learning, well-being, and opportunity through research and development; the EF+Math Program was created in 2019 to boost students' ability to learn math content by strengthening their executive function skills. AFG is an "inclusive R&D" program focused on significantly improving conditions for the social and emotional health and positive academic outcomes of learners ages 8 through 13 — a critical phase in students' lives for identity development and foundational academic development as well as the time when most students are initially assessed for disabilities — with a focus on Black and Latinx students. With the aim of improving outcomes for students with and without disabilities by transforming assessment, AFG will support R&D projects to design a responsive and accessible system of asset-based assessment that provides educators with vital information on each student's strengths and enables them to provide an instructional experience that values learner diversity.

To that end, AFG has issued a request for information from educators, researchers, caregivers, and product developers on how assessment can be conducted differently; of particular interest are ideas for how to include parents and students as partners, new assessment formats for social and emotional learning that can be integrated into learning systems, and technology-enhanced assessment that can be embedded into classroom routines. The initiative also issued a request for proposals for projects aimed at creating ways to assess how learning environments support specific aspects of students' emotional and identity development, with a focus on easy-to-use tools that support learners' multifaceted identities. Seeded with $200 million from the Gates Foundation, CZI, and the Walton Family Foundation, AERDF plans to develop a portfolio of up to five inclusive R&D programs on different topics by the end of 2023. EF+Math and AFG are budgeted for up to $40 million each.

"By identifying and creating new assessment tools that elevate a student's expertise and cultivate the natural abilities they have, we can provide a more responsive learning environment that allows for exponential growth to occur," said AFG director Temple Lovelace. "As districts embark on leading-edge, innovative formats for instruction this fall, assessment must also evolve in a complementary fashion. It is time for our assessment practices to foster promise and ignite learning in new and imaginative ways."

(Photo credit: GettyImages)