The Gordon Seminar on Educational Assessment in the Service of Learning
The Gordon Seminar is an outgrowth of the ETS Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education, which functioned between 2011 and 2013.
The Gordon Seminar, while being concerned with the improvement of educational testing, gave its primary attention to a critique of the use of standardized tests in education; the nature, use, and limitations of traditional use of educational assessments. The Gordon Seminar was convened as a response to the Commission’s stated aspiration that in the near future this system of evidence-informed judgement would become better capable of “informing and improving human learning.”
The Seminar, organized by Edmund W. Gordon, Director Emeritus of the Gordon Institute, and co-moderated by Eleanor Armour-Thomas and Eric Tucker, consists of almost two dozen scholars/practitioners of pedagogical sciences who are concerned with the application of what can be learned from measurement science that can be used to better inform teaching and learning. The Seminar began with the assumption that educational assessment can and does contribute to learning in human subjects. The task assumed by the members of the Seminar is to distill those findings to be used in the service of learning.
Since 2020, the Seminar met weekly and in autumn 2025 with the leadership of the Board of Editors: its Editor in Chief and former President of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), Stephen Sireci; along with managing Editor, Eric Tucker; and Board members: Eleanor Armour-Thomas, Eva Baker, Howard Everson, and Edmund W. Gordon; published a three-volume series The Handbook on Educational Assessment in the Service of Learning.
The Handbook consists of over 60 essays written by some of our most able scholar-practitioners who are concerned with the use of pedagogical evidence to inform and improve human learning through pedagogy - assessment, teaching, and learning.
The Handbook is available, free of charge, through the UMass Amherst University Libraries: