Fox Curriculum
Assessment and alignment
An assessment is a claim about what was taught. This is where the claim gets checked.
Three kinds of work under one question: does the evidence match the claim?
Assessment design
Rubrics, scoring guides, planning scaffolds, item and prompt design, performance tasks, and the feedback protocols that go with them.
Alignment audits
A reading of existing material against the standards and the assessments it claims to serve, ending in a written finding of what the material teaches, what it measures, and where those two disagree.
Evaluation and research
The evidence plan for a pilot, a program, or a product claim, with what would count as success written down before the data arrives.
Scored the way a rubric is scored: row by row
Set the evidence standard first. What would a learner have to produce to show the outcome was met? That is written before any instrument is drafted, and the instrument is built to it.
Build the instrument so the student-facing scaffold and the scoring guide share the same words. When a rubric is paraphrased in one place and quoted in another, the two drift apart and students are scored on language they never saw. I reproduce the rubric language in full and print the point value on the row the student fills in.
Pilot and revise against real responses, not against the instrument's own logic.
For an audit: start from the source documents, the standard, the course description, and the assessment, read the material against them, and write the finding plainly enough to hand to a committee.
For evaluation and research: a design that separates whether people liked it from whether learners can do the thing. Baseline before the change. One variable at a time where the setting allows it. Item-level analysis of where the rubric failed most often. A small-cell suppression rule set before the first table is built, so a three-classroom pilot cannot identify a student.
Who it is for
- Publishers and edtech teams shipping assessment features, item banks, or rubrics, who need the instrument to measure the skill rather than the format.
- Departments and schools aligning sections of the same course, or preparing for an external review.
- Programs and product teams who have a result, a pass rate, a pilot gain, a platform's own report, and have not yet checked whether it is real.
- Anyone who has a course and a test and is not certain they describe the same thing.
What you get
- Rubrics, scoring guides, and student-facing planning scaffolds that use the same language
- Item specifications, prompts, and performance tasks built to stated outcomes
- Feedback protocols that name the step that failed rather than the sentence
- For audits: a written alignment report with the gaps named and a recommended order of repair
- For evaluation: the evidence plan, the instruments, the analysis, and a report that states what moved, what did not, and what the design cannot claim
Instruments and studies that were built and used
The LEQ Planning Scaffold
One page, five scored rows, point value printed on each row, completed before drafting so planning is gradeable on its own. Built on the College Board long essay rubric, with the rubric language reproduced in full so scaffold and scoring guide cannot drift. Its three-distance contextualization ladder turns the most-missed point on the AP History rubrics into an instruction a student can check in ten seconds. Read the scaffold (PDF) →
ACE, adapted
A three-step constructed-response protocol, Answer, Cite something specific, Explain why it matters, carried across three AP History courses and wired into every scoring instrument rather than left on a wall. The two qualifiers are the adaptation, and each fixes a named failure the standard wording produces. Read the protocol (PDF) →
Digital practice and skill transfer
An AI-powered adaptive platform reported gains in AP United States History. The evidence standard was set before the intervention began, and question overlap was tracked alongside accuracy. Accuracy rose from 70% to 75% across 18 students with only 5 of 30 assessment items (17%) drawn from the practice bank, which rules out memorization and leaves transfer. Read the case study →
Dissertation research
A mixed-methods study of inconsistent AP World History pass rates at one site: alumni interviews, a survey on instructional preparedness, and a systematic document analysis of instructional materials benchmarked against the College Board course and exam description. The document analysis is the same method an alignment audit runs. Read about the research →
Where this is not the right service
- If you need a course built, start with Curriculum and course design. The assessments are built inside it.
- I do not produce psychometric validation at scale. For item banks that need statistical calibration, I work alongside a psychometrician rather than in place of one.
How it is scoped
An audit is scoped by the volume of material and the standards it answers to. Instrument design is scoped per instrument or per course. Evaluation is scoped by the study: what is measured, how often, and at how many sites.
Tell me what you are building.
Courses, assessments, a product that has to teach something. Send what you have and I will tell you what it needs.
Start a project →