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E.T.S. Research Institute: Charting the Future of Assessments

This in-depth report delves into four areas of the future of assessment: skills for the future, innovative measures, operations breakthroughs and feedback.

  • In the future we will measure what matters, not what's easy to measure.

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Meet the authors

  • Patrick C. Kyllonen

    Distinguished Presidential Appointee

    Patrick Kyllonen is a distinguished presidential appointee at ETS. He has conducted innovative research on higher education assessment, workforce readiness, international large-scale assessment and 21st century skills assessment. He received his B.A. from St. John's University and Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Educational Research Association, recipient of The Technical Cooperation Program Achievement Award for the “design, development, and evaluation of the Trait-Self Description (TSD) Personality Inventory,” and was a coauthor of the National Academy of Sciences 2012 report, Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century.

    Patrick C. Kyllonen
  • Amit Sevak

    Chief Executive Officer

    As CEO of ETS, Amit Sevak leads the largest private educational assessment organization in the world, with 2500 employees across 200 countries serving over 50 million people each year. Amit has been a driving force in education, learning and workforce development around the globe. He has led the University of Europe in Madrid in Spain, INTI International University in Malaysia and Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC) in Mexico. His transformational style of leadership consistently led to innovation, better learning and improved job prospects for hundreds of thousands of students and workers.

    Amit Sevak
  • Teresa Ober

    Research Scientist

    Teresa M. Ober is a Research Scientist at ETS. She received a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). At ETS, Teresa has been active in researching digital assessment and learning, with some recent work including the development of a theoretical framework for culturally responsive personalized learning. Prior, Teresa was an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame where she conducted research on student engagement and learning. Throughout her research, she maintains a focus on issues related to fairness and equity in educational assessment.

    Teresa Ober
  • Ikkyu Choi

    Managing Senior Research Scientist

    Ikkyu Choi received a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from the University of California–Los Angeles with a specialization in language assessment in 2013. At ETS, he contributed to the development of statistical, analytic, and interpretative procedures for constructed-response data as well as automated item generation and associated workflow enhancements. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals in multiple disciplines including educational measurement, language assessment, and natural language processing, and he received the 2019 best article award from International Language Testing Association (ILTA). Ikkyu also served on the editorial advisory board of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) Instructional Topics in Education Measurement Series and is currently serving as an associate editor of Language Assessment Quarterly.

    Ikkyu Choi
  • Jesse Sparks

    Managing Senior Research Scientist

    Jesse R. Sparks is a managing senior research scientist leading the Innovation Research Program on Personalized Assessment at ETS. She completed her Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Her research at ETS has focused on applying theory and research in the cognitive and learning sciences — especially areas of multiple source comprehension, discourse processing, social contexts of learning, and design of learning environments — toward the design of digital assessments for literacy, science, and social science, including scenario-based tasks that provide an overarching purpose, context, narrative, and virtual characters, and adaptive assessments that capture and respond to students’ background characteristics and dynamic solution processes.

    Jesse Sparks
  • Dan Fishtein

    Research Project Manager

    Daniel Fishtein is a Research Project Manager in the ETS Research Institute. He received an M.A. in Communication Studies and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Rhode Island. Since joining Research in 2018, Daniel has worked on mission-driven themes such as increasing diversity in graduate admissions and tracking the trajectories of CTE students and their careers. Daniel managed the development and operationalization of the PSQ assessment as the RPM for the PSQ Research Team, and provides internal communication support and planning to the VP of ETS Research Institute and the Office of the CEO. Previously, Daniel provided data analysis and support for higher-education-focused projects at the Policy Evaluation and Research Center (PERC).

    Dan Fishtein