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WASHINGTON--( BUSINESS WIRE)--Cambium Assessment, Inc., a Cambium Learning^® Group company, announced today that it is a grand prize winner in the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) inaugural automated scoring challenge. NCES, which administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as The Nation’s Report Card, launched its first automated scoring challenge in 2021, awarding four grand prizes and recognizing four runner-up teams.

NCES evaluated participants for accuracy of machine-provided scores (in comparison to human scorers), as well as interpretability, explainability, and fairness of scores in a technical report. The winners used advanced natural language processing methods that promise to reduce scoring costs while maintaining accuracy similar to human scoring.

Cambium Assessment is a grand prize winner in the item-specific part of the challenge as well as a runner-up in the generic portion, where automated scoring models were trained without access to the item data. Automated scoring is the use of statistical and computational linguistic methods to model scores assigned by human raters to unconstrained open-ended test items. All top-performing teams used transformer-based neural network architectures as part of their modeling.

“This award is an exciting recognition of the depth of Cambium Assessment’s research efforts in developing our machine scoring engines,” said  Steve Kromer, president of Cambium Assessment. “We use our scoring engines to automate the scoring of open-ended student responses using a robust and innovative hybrid human-engine scoring approach in K-12 assessment.”

Cambium Assessment has been using neural networks, including more recently the transformer-based networks, in its production automated scoring approach for four years. This recognition further confirms that Cambium Assessment’s use of deep learning models provides students, educators, and state clients with state-of-the-art automated scoring. Automated scoring offers a number of benefits including faster scoring, cost savings, improved score consistency within and across administrations, and potentially higher-quality scoring of items when combined with human scoring. The NCES competition also showcased the company’s work for its psychometric merit in the technical report and for its ability to replicate human scoring.

Other winners include Measurement Incorporated, UMass-Amherst and the University of Duisburg-Essen. Additional details on the challenge are here.

About Cambium Assessment

Cambium Assessment is the clear market leader pushing the boundaries of psychometrics, standards-based adaptive assessments and technology innovations. Our continuum of capabilities and services has enabled numerous states and education consortia to transition from paper-pencil testing and into online-assessment systems almost instantaneously. In the 2018–2019 school year alone, we delivered more than 60 million tests to nearly a third of the nation’s students in 28 states and jurisdictions. All of these tests were processed with the rapid scoring and reporting turnaround essential for educators to identify their students’ strengths and needs promptly.

Cambium Assessment is a part of  Cambium Learning^® Group, the education essentials company. Across all areas of our organization, we deliver technology solutions and services that emphasize the elements that are most essential to education’s success: simplicity, certainty and now.

About Cambium Learning Group

Cambium Learning^® Group is the education essentials company, providing award-winning education technology and services for K-12 markets. With an intentionally curated portfolio of respected global brands, Cambium serves as a leader in the education space, helping millions of educators and students feel more universally valued each and every day. In everything it does, the company focuses on the elements that are most essential to the success of education, delivering simpler, more certain solutions that make a meaningful difference right now. 

To learn more, visit www.cambiumlearning.com or follow Cambium on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium. The Cambium family of brands includes: Cambium Assessment, Lexia^® Learning, Learning A-Z^®, Voyager Sopris Learning^®, ExploreLearning^®, Time4Learning^®, and Kurzweil Education^®.