Tenaha O’Reilly is a managing principal research scientist in the ETS Research Institute. Currently in the English Language Arts Learning and Assessment team, he has led and co-led a range of research and development projects in the areas of reading, assessment, and the learning sciences. His research has focused on AI literacy, reading comprehension, foundational reading skills, background knowledge, metacognition, text cohesion and assessment.
He has led or co-led over $30 million dollars of projects that leverage the research in the learning sciences to improve reading assessment for students and teachers, and evaluating ways to improve students’ reading comprehension and learning with AI. Tenaha was the co-Principal Investigator of the assessment strand of the Reading for Understanding (RfU) Initiative grant, charged with creating the next generation of pre-K–12 assessments, and has served as PI or co-PI on several internal ETS and external federal grants. He has coedited two books on the next generation of reading assessments and has published policy papers in various areas of reading including a report on America’s reading crisis. He has contributed to several literacy frameworks that have guided the development of innovative assessments of reading, and his research has led to new products such as ReadBasix, a measure of foundational reading skills, and ReadAuthentix, a measure of 21st century literacy. Tenaha is currently co-leading a team focused on building measures of AI literacy and is Co-PI on two external grants aimed at transforming postsecondary education by creating real-world tasks that model expert thinking and give students meaningful practice using AI as a learning partner.
His work is cited in national and international literacy frameworks including the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Reading and Global competence frameworks and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading framework. One of his key contributions is the conceptualization and development of scenario-based assessment for measuring literacy.
Last updated: 1/27/2026