Key Takeaways from the K-12 Assessment Customer Discovery Session in San Antonio

[Amy_Haskell]

Mastery Connect + Canvas Quizzes

Last week, we hosted a K-12 Assessment Product Discovery Session (CDS) in San Antonio, bringing together curriculum and assessment leaders from districts across the country. This in-person event provided a valuable opportunity for participants to engage directly with our product, research, design, and product marketing teams and to influence the future direction of Mastery Connect and Canvas Quizzes.

This post highlights key themes from the day and how they’re shaping our future development.

Making Assessment Meaningful: Building Balanced Systems That Support Real Learning

Educators at the session shared a clear vision: assessment systems should be balanced, intentional, and designed to support learning -  not just measure it. Across the group, there was strong consensus on the importance of strategically combining assessment of, for, and as learning throughout the school year. This includes using formative, interim, and summative assessments in ways that inform instruction, guide intervention, and support student growth over time. This shared vision is grounded in research-based best practices and strengthened by a close partnership between our Research team and customers—ensuring that what we build is not only evidence-informed, but also responsive to the real-world needs of schools and districts.

District leaders emphasized that balanced systems should:

• Provide consistent expectations and normed practices across classrooms and grade levels
• Offer flexible delivery methods that adapt to different instructional contexts
• Empower teachers with actionable insights without adding complexity or administrative burden
  

Within these systems, educators stressed the growing importance of authentic assessment - assessment that reflects real-world applications and promotes deeper student engagement. The group agreed that authentic assessment isn’t just about the item type or assessment format; it’s about how the assessment is embedded within the learning experience. To be truly effective, these tasks must be intentionally integrated into instructional contexts where students are actively engaging with content, applying critical skills, and receiving meaningful feedback that drives their growth. This approach ensures that assessment becomes a natural extension of learning, not a separate or disconnected event.

Together the group defined key elements of authentic assessments, including:

• Project-based tasks and performance assessments
• Student-created responses, including video, audio, and multimedia formats
• Rubric-based scoring that provides meaningful feedback
• Tasks that promote student agency and connect learning to relevant, real-world contexts
  

This feedback reinforces our direction and deepens our commitment to building tools that support instructionally meaningful, research-based balanced assessment systems that improve student outcomes. As we evolve our roadmap, we’re focused on empowering educators with solutions that make assessments more authentic, more actionable, and more connected to student learning.

AI Across the Assessment Lifecycle

A major area of discussion was the potential for AI to support educators and enhance student learning across the assessment lifecycle. Participants explored ideas for how AI could:

• Generate high-quality, standards-aligned items and quizzes
• Provide in-the-moment feedback to students via chatbots
• Recommend instructional strategies and accommodations based on assessment performance
• Offer real-time item analysis and longitudinal insights
  

Educators also voiced the need for thoughtful implementation, balancing teacher autonomy with district oversight to ensure quality and alignment. This dialogue will guide how we build AI-powered features that help educators reclaim instructional time by streamlining assessment creation. At the same time, we reaffirmed the importance of innovating with AI in ways that uphold content quality and standards alignment - while unlocking real-time insights and accelerating student growth through meaningful feedback and tailored learning opportunities.

Actionable Reporting and Insights

Participants emphasized that data should be used to drive instruction - but only if it’s timely, meaningful, and easy to interpret. Across districts, there was a strong desire for dashboards that make it simple to:

• View growth and proficiency trends
• Compare trends across schools, grade levels, and classes
• Customize visualizations for different roles
• Connect formative and benchmark data into a coherent, easy to interpret picture
  

This feedback is shaping future reporting enhancements that prioritize usability while delivering rich, actionable insights—empowering PLCs, administrators, and instructional teams to better support student learning across classrooms and schools.

Feedback on New Features for Back to School

Attendees got a first look at upcoming features in Mastery Connect and Canvas Quizzes, all designed to support educators and administrators heading into the new school year. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with particular enthusiasm for:

• A simplified workflow for creating multiple trackers simultaneously in Mastery Connect
• AI-powered item suggestions based on the Mastery Item Bank when building follow-up assessments using Quick Reassess
• A more intuitive item bank experience for quickly finding and authoring high-quality assessment content in Mastery Connect 
• The ability to enable the student and parent Mastery Connect experience in Spanish 
• Enhanced proctoring capabilities in New Quizzes that flag multiple active sessions
• An updated New Quizzes interface that makes course navigation more seamless for faculty
  
  

These enhancements are focused on reducing administrative overhead, streamlining district-wide assessment workflows, and supporting high-quality, instructionally meaningful assessments that help drive student learning forward.

Looking Ahead

The San Antonio CDS offered an valuable window into the needs and priorities of today’s K-12 educators. From rethinking the definition of authentic assessment to exploring how AI can power more personalized learning opportunities, the insights shared will directly shape the evolution of our assessment tools.

We are grateful to the attendees who joined us and contributed their expertise, and we look forward to continuing this conversation as we build the next generation of assessment solutions for K-12 education.