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.
Meet the authors
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Patrick C. Kyllonen
Distinguished Presidential Appointee
Patrick Kyllonen is a distinguished presidential appointee at ETS. He has conducted innovative research on (a) higher education assessment, (b) workforce readiness, (c) international large-scale assessment (e.g., Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA), and (d) 21st century skills assessment, such as creativity, collaborative problem solving and situational interviews. He received his B.A. from St. John's University and Ph.D. from Stanford University and is author of Generating Items for Cognitive Tests (with S. Irvine, 2001), Learning and Individual Differences (with P. L. Ackerman & R. D. Roberts, 1999), Extending Intelligence: Enhancement and New Constructs (with R. Roberts & L. Stankov, 2008), and Innovative Assessment of Collaboration (with A. von Davier & M. Zhu, 2017). 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.
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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.
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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). Before joining ETS, she 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.
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Ikkyu Choi
Managing Senior Research Scientist
Ikkyu Choi is a as lManaging Senior Research Scientist at ETS. He 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). He chaired a committee and served on multiple committees for ILTA. He has also served on the editorial advisory board of the National Council on Measurement in Education Instructional Topics in Educational Measurement Series and Language Assessment Quarterly.
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Jesse Sparks
Managing Senior Research Scientist
Jesse R. Sparks is a senior research scientist in the Learning and Assessment Foundations and Innovations research center in the Research & Development division at ETS. She joined ETS in 2013 after completing her Ph.D. in the learning sciences (with a certificate in cognitive science) 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 domains, including scenario-based tasks that provide an overarching purpose, narrative, and virtual characters, game-based assessments that support student engagement, and adaptive assessments that capture and respond to students’ background characteristics and dynamic solution processes.
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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, focusing on science communication and public communication and a B.A. in Psychology, both 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. Additionally, Daniel provides internal communication support and planning to the VP of ETS Research Institute and the Office of the CEO. Prior to joining The Research Institute, he worked for 4 years in the Policy Evaluation and Research Center (PERC) at ETS, providing data analysis and support to a number of higher education-focused projects.
