Randy Elliot Bennett

Randy Elliot Bennett is Norman O. Frederiksen Chair in Assessment Innovation in the Research & Development Division at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. A graduate of the doctoral program at Teachers College, Columbia University, Bennett began his employment at ETS in 1979. Since the 1980s, he has conducted research on integrating advances in cognitive science, technology, and measurement to create new approaches to assessment. Bennett's work has included research on presenting and scoring open-ended test items on the computer, on multimedia and simulation in testing, and on generating test items automatically. For this work, he was given the ETS Senior Scientist Award in 1996 and the ETS Career Achievement Award in 2005.

Since 2007, Bennett has directed an integrated research initiative titled, Cognitively-Based Assessment of, for, and as Learning (CBAL). This initiative is attempting to create a model for a balanced system of K–12 assessment that provides accountability information and supports classroom learning. His and his colleagues' work has been described in the George Lucas Educational Foundation publication Edutopia, in Education Week's Teacher Beat online blog, in a report from Education Sector, in a Science review of innovative approaches to educational assessment, in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) journal, Education Leadership, and in the U.S. Department of Education’s National Educational Technology Plan 2010 (PDF).

Dr. Bennett is the author of many publications including "Technology and Testing" (with Fritz Drasgow and Ric Luecht) in Educational Measurement (4th Edition), What Does it Mean to Be a Nonprofit Educational Measurement Organization in the 21st Century (PDF), Inevitable and Inexorable: The Continuing Story of Technology and Assessment, and How the Internet will Help Large-Scale Testing Reinvent Itself.

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