The Speakers

Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Karin Hess

Educator, Author, and President, Educational Research in Action

Dr. Karin Hess is the author/co-author of fourteen books/book chapters and the Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrices, now used in classrooms across the US and in more than 100 other countries. She is a former classroom teacher and school administrator with over 40 years of deep experience in curriculum, instruction, and assessment and recognized internationally as a leader in applying cognitive rigor, depth of knowledge (DOK), and learning progressions to the development of state and school-based curriculum and assessment systems. Over the years, she has distinguished herself as an expert in competency-based learning, specializing in the design and use of learning progressions and formative and performance-based assessments for preK-12.

Dr. Hess has been a technical advisor to MicroSociety Inc in creating observable work-ready skills for classrooms and MicroSocietyventures; to EL Education’s development of criteria for high-quality student work, to Renaissance Learning’s application of learning progressions in test development, and to numerous state departments of education.