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As we know all too well, school districts are grappling with a myriad of challenges — from staffing shortages to surging student needs. While schools are increasingly leveraging technology, how much can digital solutions really help ease the burden as we aim to provide the highest possible services to our students and school community?

Throughout my 25 years as a school psychologist, I’ve seen firsthand how the Digital Assessments Library for Schools can streamline assessments — liberating staff from time-consuming administrative tasks and freeing them to focus on what matters most: supporting students and driving better outcomes. Even more important, digital assessments help promote equity among districts and empower student growth. 

We’re seeing impressive results from those making the switch. In fact, my Pearson colleague Chuck Eberle, who is the Product Owner for Pearson's Digital Assessment Library for Schools, told me that we’ve had steady adoption rates, including by many of the largest school districts, since we launched our digital library in 2017. 

How do you decide whether the DALS is right for your district? We’ve put together this guide to help you figure it out.

The pursuit of equity in education has an important ally in Pearson’s Digital Assessment Library for Schools (DALS), which is helping level the playing field and provide the best outcomes for all students. Throughout my 25-year career as a school psychologist, I've observed how subtle inequalities in testing can have a profound impact, inadvertently creating barriers and limiting the potential of students. 

While all schools strive for equality, it can be difficult when practitioners don’t have access to the most effective tests for their students’ needs, often due to budget constraints. Here’s how DALS helps solve four common scenarios practitioners face.

With the proliferation of AI-driven recruiting software, it may seem that candidate screening is becoming easier than ever. But, for specialized employee populations — security cleared personnel, police and public safety officers, critical infrastructure employees and more — finding quality candidates can’t be solved with technology alone.

Some specialized labor pools are extremely small, like cleared employees. Other security-focused jobs are physically demanding and dangerous. These types of roles can present mental health challenges due to their high-stress nature. As a result, organizations across government and the private sector are struggling to recruit new workers.

Fortunately, there are tools available to HR departments and staffing agencies tasked with finding employees for high-security positions. Personality, behavioral and cognitive assessments complement existing screening tools and interviews, and they help identify potential employees with the personality traits needed for success in high-pressure or security-cleared roles. 

“High-security jobs inherently require a high level of stress management, adaptability and personal integrity in a candidate,” says Patrick Moran, Pearson’s director of sales for government and public safety. “Personality measures capture these and other key aspects of a person’s presentation of themselves in these unique workplace settings.”

Assessments can improve the recruitment process for high-security candidates in a number of important ways, including:

While it is certainly true that no two students are alike, the same can be said for teachers! Every classroom has its own set of expectations and routines, which can make for a difficult adjustment for everyone involved going into each new school year. To help kickstart your year, our behavior experts have put together a list of six nearly foolproof tips for starting (and keeping) your classroom on the right track.

With the end of the Great Resignation, it may seem that employee retention is no longer a top problem for HR leaders. But in high-security industries — those involving security clearances, running critical infrastructure, managing private security personnel and more — retention remains a costly challenge.  

This specialized labor pool is small; for example, just over a million people have a Top Secret security clearance, and while that number seems large out of context, when considering the number of roles to be filled, it’s actually not very big. On top of the constrained candidate pool, hiring in these high-security industries is a laborious process complete with extensive background checks, identity verification and a specific set of skills required.  

The time and effort it takes to hire high-security employees and ensure they obtain the training and clearances they need for their jobs mean that losing an employee carries prohibitive costs and can leave critical roles unfilled.  

What can HR leaders do to prevent turnover in these industries? Competitive compensation packages are table stakes, particularly as inflation hits all sectors of the economy. But there is more to staying at a job than just the salary. HR leaders can utilize these five strategies to reduce turnover in this unique employee population. 

For educators and many families, the “real” new year comes in September. The start of a fresh school year brings a mixture of emotions for students, caregivers and school staff alike — excitement, anticipation and, sometimes, stress. Setting a positive tone at the beginning can help ease the transition back to school.

Digital assessments have emerged as a powerful tool for measuring student learning and understanding. They promote equity through fair and unbiased results while offering real-time feedback that allows educators to track student achievement and make timely adjustments for personalized assessment.

I would say that digital assessments — along with their robust scoring and interpretation capabilities — are the biggest game changers in the educational assessment industry to date. They’ve revolutionized how practitioners can gather data and engage with their students, all while reducing human error. 

As a former school psychologist, digital assessment was a powerful tool that would give me accurate and insightful results, allowing me to better collaborate with educators and families to support the overall well-being of the children I was working with. The time savings I gained from digital assessment enabled me to employ other extremely valuable skill sets, such as direct interventions with students and ongoing consultation with staff, parents, and administration.

Yet, as educators embrace the shift to these resources, facing the many choices available, the logistics involved in administration, and the best ways to analyze data for individual support can feel overwhelming. In my current role as a member of the K-12 education team for Pearson Clinical Assessments, I often work with educators to help them select the right digital assessment tools for their district’s unique needs. I also offer strategies for effective administration and results interpretation.

Here are some of the digital assessment benefits and best practices I regularly share in those discussions.

Hello everyone! I am Kristen Getz, the Product Owner (PO) of Q-interactive®. As the PO, my main role is to champion the customer’s needs throughout the product development journey. Before joining Pearson, I spent 14 years in clinical practice. At Pearson I have been focused on developing tests and improving our platforms for clinicians. My passion for assessments comes from my experience working with children and adults, aiming to create products that are psychometrically sound and user-friendly while saving valuable time.

The Q-interactive platform embodies everything I believe in and strive for: precision, intuitiveness, and innovation. Q-interactive is revolutionizing the field of psychological assessment, offering more accurate and creative ways to measure constructs. The new app's underlying technology has unlocked a plethora of new features that we will be gradually releasing, all based on feedback from you, our valued customers. Stay tuned because we know you will be excited about what is coming next!