Don't Show Your Work. Explain Your Thinking. Introducing Innovative Assessments
What if an assessment could ask a student "why?" and actually understand the answer?We sat down with two members of Khan Academy's assessments team — Natalie McClurg
(former high school math teacher, now senior assessment content creator on the math team)
and Liz Rutkowski (longtime high school ELA teacher, now on the high school ELA assessments
team) — to talk about Khanductor and the new "Explain Your Thinking" item type inside
Khan Academy's new Interim Assessments.
Khanductor is a purpose-built, AI-powered conversation facilitator that appears only in
assessments. It stays content-neutral, works from rubrics written by our own math and ELA
content experts, and follows a traditional item with a short conversation — giving students
a chance to show what they actually understand, not just which answer they picked.
In this conversation:
• How "Explain Your Thinking" items are structured — traditional item, then conversation
• Why the conversation looks different in math vs. ELA
• How Khanductor is trained on expert-written rubrics, and how our research team validates
that AI scoring matches human scoring
• The guardrails that keep Khanductor from leading students toward an answer
• What teachers get back: full conversation transcripts, standards-level highlights, and
signals about student engagement and discourse
• What district administrators can see, and how it can target professional learning
• Why students are getting playful with it — and what that tells us
ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY INTERIM ASSESSMENTS
Khan Academy's new Interim Assessments are rolling out for SY 2026–27. They're built to fit
a single 45-minute class period, use adaptive technology that adjusts item difficulty in
real time to surface unfinished learning, and turn results into personalized learning
pathways — always including on-grade-level content, with remedial and foundational work
layered in as needed. Teachers review, adjust, and approve those pathways before students
see them.
See if your district qualifies for a demo: https://blog.khanacademy.org/more-than-a-score-reimagining-assessments-to-accelerate-student-learning/
0:00 Meet the assessments team
0:31 What Khanductor is — and how it differs from Khanmigo
1:35 "Explain Your Thinking" items in math
2:44 How Explain Your Thinking works in ELA
4:05 Training Khanductor on expert-written rubrics
5:12 Guardrails: no leading the student to an answer
5:40 Doing something genuinely new in assessment
6:15 What teachers see: conversations, standards, and engagement
7:51 What district admins see — and targeting professional learning
9:28 Standards-aligned by design
10:09 Real student conversations
11:23 Paper to digital: getting the window back
12:55 The conversation every teacher wants time for
13:41 "I don't want to see your steps"
15:30 What's next Receive SMS online on sms24.me
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