.png)
Director, Marketing Communications
As proud sponsors of this year’s ASU+GSV Summit, MetaMetrics was thrilled to participate and engage with thought leaders across the education and technology sectors, especially since so many included our partners! This year’s theme, “Here Comes the Sun,” perfectly captured the spirit of optimism radiating from the forward-thinking educators, innovators, and leaders gathered to share transformative ideas for the future of education. There was a lot to digest but we did our best to pull out some highlights. Here’s a very brief rundown of insights and themes that emerged from the summit.
Revolutionizing K-12 Education
During the panel “What’s Next in the K-12 Ecosystem,” industry frontrunners explored ways to enhance the K-12 learning experience, focusing on better preparation for the workforce, innovative assessment techniques, and crafting engaging educational content. Leaders highlighted the importance of elevating both student and teacher experiences, incorporating AI to personalize learning, and tackling systemic challenges like equitable teacher pay and rigid educational pathways.
James Rhyu, CEO of Stride, Inc., emphasized, “A lot of times when we think about education we think about the assessment or we think about the outcome… But actually, for the student itself, for the customer, it’s actually the experience that they have that will engage them to get to those outcomes.”
Which leads to the question of how we (the edtech industry) develop the tools, platforms, and tech that are ultimately used by students. Are we building products in a way that ensures they are engaging for grade-school end-users?
The session “Kid-Tested, Evidence-Approved: The Future of EdTech Design” brought together a panel of thought leaders to discuss the merits of co-designing edtech products with children. This approach ensures that educational tools are not only academically effective but also engaging and enjoyable, by incorporating the direct input and insights of young learners.
Michael Preston shared insights on how involving children in the design process ensures that educational tools truly meet their needs and preferences, potentially enhancing both engagement and effectiveness.
Ensuring Equity and Access
This topic is critical and we were thrilled to see it woven into so many of the other topics that it is part of the fabric of all discussion. When thinking about how to scale education, this challenge of ensuring opportunity for all students must scale too. The panel “The Future of Education at Scale” discussed expansive strategies for increasing access to quality education through technology and innovative partnerships. Figures like Michael M. Crow and Doug Becker emphasized overcoming “human arrogance” and breaking free from limiting social constructs to scale educational opportunities effectively.
How can technology get us there? In the panel discussion “Building Equality & Access into the Innovation of AI Education“, experts explored the integration of artificial intelligence in education with a focus on ensuring equity and access. The panelists address the challenges of deploying AI tools in educational settings while maintaining an ethical approach to democratize these technological advancements.
Dr. Deblina Pakhira, Research Manager at Digital Promise, emphasizes the ongoing product development approach needed for integrating AI in education that keeps educators, parents, community members and learners at the center of the loop from beginning to end: “We need to keep on thinking about how we can improve our product and make it relevant for our learners as time passes by, and that’s how it will be more equitable.”
The New Era of Assessments
In “The Future of Testing & Assessment in a GenAI and SAT Optional World,” experts debated the evolving world of educational assessments amidst the rise of AI and changing college admissions standards. The panel, including voices like Laura Slover, Managing Director, Skills for the Future, ETS and Gavin Cooney, Founder & CEO, Learnosity, discussed the transformative potential of AI in reshaping learning and assessment landscapes.
Cooney noted, “this is a massive game changer; it’s the biggest opportunity we’ve had in education in a hundred years… and it’s bigger than the Internet, it’s bigger than the iPhone, in terms of what we can do here…”
Did you miss our big assessment-related announcement at ASU+GSV? We announced the development of the MetaMetrics® Writing AccuRater, an AI-based, automatic scoring system for student writing! Read the full press release for more details.
Postsecondary Pathways and Career Readiness
The kids are gonna be alright (really!). Whether they choose to go to college or into career training programs after high school, there are emerging avenues to ensure they can do either with a low debt-burden and great lifetime earning potential.
The summit featured panels like “Beyond Degrees: Illuminating Post Secondary Paths to Prosperity” and “Graduating Students with Less Debt and More Skills,” which highlighted the emerging alternatives to traditional college pathways. Experts laid out how today’s students can pursue promising careers without a four-year degree and how the education infrastructure can support them by offering strategies to enhance the value proposition of higher education by focusing on skill acquisition and reducing student debt.
Julie Lammers, SVP of Advocacy and CSR at American Student Assistance, emphasizes the need for diversification in educational pathways: “We need to start these conversations much earlier and make sure that [students] understand who they want to be in the world if we’re ever going to get them to a place of being able to make an informed choice about what comes next after high school.”
We couldn’t agree more! Here at MetaMetrics, we have been developing Lexile and Quantile Career Readiness Solutions that include a suite of assessment solutions, career databases (that integrate educational demands and salary data) and growth planners to prepare students for bright futures.
Is AI the Tutor of the Future?
At ASU+GSV this year, an interesting discussion unfolded during the panel titled “The Rise of AI Tutors: A New Era of Individual Learner Support.” The focus was on the revolutionary role of AI in personalizing education. Panelists, experts drawn from a spectrum of fields, passionately debated how AI tutors could not only boost student engagement and academic success but also democratize education by tailoring support to each learner’s unique needs.
Kristen DiCerbo, the visionary Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy, shared an inspiring vision for the near future: “We should be thinking about what are the learning problems we want to solve in the next two years and how AI can help solve them.” Her statement underscored AI’s potential to significantly enhance educational outcomes by addressing specific learning challenges.
AI may indeed make high-impact tutoring even more impactful and its success will largely lie in linking classroom learning to outside learning so they can support learning in tandem. Shameless plug: Our Lexile and Quantile-powered Solutions for Tutoring can help connect assessments, tutoring programs, and classroom learning through a common growth scale.
Literacy and the Science of Reading
As the developers of the Lexile® Framework for Reading, supporting literacy among readers of all ages is close to our hearts. Over the last few years, we have been working hard on research-based, science of reading-aligned tools (like our Lexile® Decodability Analysis for publishers of decodable books and Lexile® Find a Decodable Book to make finding decodables easier for parents and educators) to support emerging readers. We even built out the Lexile® and Quantile® Educator Academy to provide teachers with training on how to use these new tools in the classroom, a critical part of the SOR shift. We’re on it and we were excited to see that others are realizing how important this is too.
The session “Science of Reading in the 21st Century Classroom: Getting Our Students on Grade Level” provided a deep dive into modern strategies for literacy. The conversation centered on the pivotal shift needed in literacy education to adhere to the proven approaches of the science of reading.
Melissa Gude, the Chief Academic Officer of the Little Rock School District, spoke about the profound transformation required, stating, “We had to unravel deeply held beliefs about how to teach reading and then build back up.” Her words highlighted the extensive support systems necessary for educators as they navigate this vital change.
Emphasizing the urgency of these educational reforms, Jess Sliwerski, Co-founder & CEO of Ignite Reading, passionately argued for immediate action in teaching reading skills. “Kids need to learn to read yesterday, today, right now. Our kids can’t wait for us as adults to figure it out; they need to learn to read.” His compelling call to action stressed the essential nature of literacy and the immediate need for effective teaching methods.
Looking Back to Look Ahead
The 2024 ASU+GSV Summit served as a melting pot of ideas, with each session weaving a part of the larger narrative on the future of education. From embracing technology to enhance learning to ensuring equitable access and supporting our educators, the summit offered a roadmap for the journey ahead in education. As we continue to navigate these themes, the collective wisdom shared at the summit provides both inspiration and practical pathways forward for all stakeholders in the educational ecosystem. We look forward to reconvening next year!