Karin Hess

Karin Hess, EdD, is founder and president of Educational Research in Action and author of the Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrices. She is a former classroom teacher and school administrator with more than 40 years of experience in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. She is an internationally recognized leader in applying the concepts of cognitive rigor, depth of knowledge, and learning progressions to the design and development of state and school-based curriculum and assessment systems. An...See more

Karin Hess, EdD, is founder and president of Educational Research in Action and author of the Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrices. She is a former classroom teacher and school administrator with more than 40 years of experience in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. She is an internationally recognized leader in applying the concepts of cognitive rigor, depth of knowledge, and learning progressions to the design and development of state and school-based curriculum and assessment systems. An expert in multiple content areas, she specializes in the design and use of performance-based assessments for preK-12 students. At the Center for Assessment in Dover, New Hampshire, Hess led the development of multistate K-12 standards and designed general and special education large-scale state assessments. Previously, she worked as New Jersey's State Director for Gifted Education, a program evaluator for the Vermont Mathematics Project, and a developer and editor of K-8 performance tasks for Science Exemplars (www.exemplars.com). She has provided technical expertise to EL Education, Renaissance Learning, the Mathematics Advisory Team for Achieve3000, and the Critical Thinking Advisory Team for Mentoring Minds, as well as to the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) consortium in revising the 2020 English Language Development (ELD) Standards Framework. Hess has authored or coauthored more than a dozen education books. Most recently, she authored A Local Assessment Toolkit to Promote Deeper Learning (Corwin, 2018), codeveloped Benchmark Education's Ready to Advance curriculum for prekindergarten (2019), and coauthored, with Rose Colby and Dan Joseph, Deeper Competency-Based Learning: Making Equitable, Student-Centered, Sustainable Shifts (Corwin, 2020). In her work with schools, Hess provides practical, classroom-tested tools and in-depth guidance for implementing competency-based educational systems and strategies to enhance deeper learning for every student. See less