Assessment, with or without AI.

Assessment is where I get genuinely enthusiastic. The traditional formats everyone dismisses (multiple choice, true/false, matching) are enormously powerful when they’re written well and used as retrieval practice rather than as a final verdict. Most of us were never taught to write them properly.

Assessment on its own terms: no AI required

Straight assessment practice, grounded in the science of learning. Useful whether or not your building has settled its AI questions.

Writing genuinely good multiple choice, true/false, and matching items
Low‑stakes assessment and retrieval practice by design
Immediate and timely feedback as a driver of student success
Rubric design, grading practices, and using the data you collect
Moving paper‑and‑pencil assessments online without losing rigor

Assessment with AI in the loop

This is where AI most clearly earns its place: drafting the volume of items and feedback that used to be impossible for one teacher to produce.

Generating item banks, then editing them with real expertise
Auto‑feedback on low‑stakes checks, so students get it immediately
Building retrieval practice activities in minutes instead of hours
What AI should never be trusted to score, and why

Reading and literacy data

Screening and progress monitoring only work when the whole system points at the same skills.

Screening, diagnostic, and progress‑monitoring systems that align
Reading data analysis and grouping decisions
Program evaluation and curriculum review

See the literacy work →

From my assessment course

The multiple choice exercise

My students start by generating multiple choice questions with a general tool (ChatGPT, Claude, whatever they prefer) and then generate a comparable set with a teacher‑specific tool like MagicSchool. They put the two side by side.

Then the real work starts. They apply what they’ve learned about what actually makes a good multiple choice item, and they edit. They cut the implausible distractors, fix the ones with two defensible answers, rewrite the stems that gave the answer away.

By the end they’ve decided for themselves which tool they’ll reach for in their own classrooms, and, more importantly, they’ve seen that neither tool could have done it without them. That’s the human in the loop, in about ninety minutes.

Assessment, with or without AI.

The multiple choice exercise

Assessment PD for your staff?

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