Jul 6 • Creative Force Dispatch
Creative Force Dispatch
Reading and Math Scores Rise for Younger Kids, Stall for Teens
The latest release of NAEP's Long-Term Trend data offers tentative signs of recovery after years of decline — but only for some students. Nine-year-olds improved in both reading and math compared with three years ago, with the lowest-performing students in that group making especially large strides. For 13-year-olds, the story is different: their scores in both subjects have stagnated, showing no statistically significant change since the last administration in 2023. The middle-school numbers carry a sting of history. Between 1978 and 2012, the average LTT math score for 13-year-olds climbed 21 points — a rare bright spot across five decades of data. This report shows most of those gains have now been erased, with the lowest-performing students showing no improvement over the 1978 results. "As a nation, we have to bring more focus to the middle school years," the National Assessment Governing Board's executive director told reporters.
CREATIVE FORCE: The divergence between age groups reframes the recovery debate. The 9-year-olds tested were four when the pandemic hit and largely started school after in-person instruction resumed; today's 13-year-olds spent critical early-literacy and numeracy years amid closures. For math educators, the data sharpens a question the shortlist keeps circling — whether our measurements are capturing real learning, and where in the K–12 arc intervention actually moves the needle.
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Are Universities Returning to In-Person Exams to Combat AI Cheating?
Faced with students submitting polished written work they can't explain when questioned, universities are reaching back to a method as old as Socrates: the oral exam. Alongside a revival of invigilated, closed-book sittings, institutions are experimenting with Socratic-style questioning and a broader philosophical shift from assessing a student's output to assessing their process — how they arrived at an answer, not just what the answer was.
The most striking example is structural rather than defensive. The University of Surrey has redesigned its entire curriculum and assessment policy to embed AI into every course from September 2026, moving toward evaluating students' "process" over their "outputs." Third-year civil engineering students, for instance, might use AI to help design a building, then verify every AI-generated output by hand calculation and modeling. The London School of Economics reports rising use of oral assessment and process-based grading, while the University of Bath is dropping its traffic-light system for a simpler two-lane approach.
CREATIVE FORCE: This is the assessment conversation maturing past the ban-versus-embrace binary. The interesting institutions aren't asking whether students use AI — they assume they do — but whether existing assessments still measure genuine understanding. As one commenter on the piece put it, the question shifts from "What answer did the student give?" to "How did the student arrive at it?" That's where real learning becomes visible — and it's a direct practical response to the measurement anxiety running through this issue.
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Unfixed Newsletter: When the Tools Aren't Stable Public Utilities
The latest Unfixed dispatch trains a campus-governance lens on a month of turbulence in frontier-model access. Its central argument: colleges are building teaching, research, advising, and administrative workflows on systems whose availability can be changed by companies, regulators, or governments with little warning — and that is a campus governance problem even when the immediate fight is happening far from campus.
The issue connects several threads practitioners are tracking. Both OpenAI and Anthropic ran into federal limits on model access this cycle, a reminder that the systems institutions are being encouraged to build around are not stable public utilities. Closer to the classroom, Instructure named an exclusive AI-detection partner for Canvas, folding integrity tooling directly into the LMS — a change in the defaults that risks a tool-first response to what is really an assessment problem. And the California Faculty Association is backing legislation to restrict Cal State from replacing faculty work with generative AI, foregrounding labor governance that procurement decisions often skip.
CREATIVE FORCE: For a community of teachers and practitioners, this is the sober counterweight to the adoption enthusiasm elsewhere. Building durable pedagogy on tools that can be throttled by security politics or export reviews is a strategic risk, not just a technical one. The newsletter's framing — access, control, and who governs the infrastructure — completes this issue's arc: it's the "control" facet of the same trust question raised by test scores and exam redesign.
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