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What if an assessment could ask a student "why?" and actually understand the answer?Uploaded 08-09-26We 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 assessmentsteam) — to talk about Khanductor and the new "Explain Your Thinking" item type insideKhan Academy's new Interim Assessments.Khanductor is a purpose-built, AI-powered conversation facilitator that appears only inassessments. It stays content-neutral, works from rubrics written by our own math and ELAcontent experts, and follows a traditional item with a short conversation — giving studentsa 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 usABOUT KHAN ACADEMY INTERIM ASSESSMENTSKhan Academy's new Interim Assessments are rolling out for SY 2026–27. They're built to fita single 45-minute class period, use adaptive technology that adjusts item difficulty inreal time to surface unfinished learning, and turn results into personalized learningpathways — always including on-grade-level content, with remedial and foundational worklayered in as needed. Teachers review, adjust, and approve those pathways before studentssee 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 team0:31 What Khanductor is — and how it differs from Khanmigo1:35 "Explain Your Thinking" items in math2:44 How Explain Your Thinking works in ELA4:05 Training Khanductor on expert-written rubrics5:12 Guardrails: no leading the student to an answer5:40 Doing something genuinely new in assessment6:15 What teachers see: conversations, standards, and engagement7:51 What district admins see — and targeting professional learning9:28 Standards-aligned by design10:09 Real student conversations 11:23 Paper to digital: getting the window back12:55 The conversation every teacher wants time for13:41 "I don't want to see your steps"15:30 What's next Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
