Dr. Karen Barton has a life-long passion for ensuring assessments and learning environments serve all learners fairly and equitably. Karen leads the state design and development teams, including product management, assessment design and development, and software solutions. Collectively, these teams are focused on statewide innovations in assessment and learning designed to reach all learners, regardless of ability, need, background, school type, or placement.

Karen started her career as a special education teacher and has deep experience in education, psychometrics, research, and assessment development. She has contributed to educational research and leadership in areas such as validity and accessibility, evidence-based test development, scoring, scaling, reporting, learning progressions, and analytics. She has extensive experience leading psychometrics for numerous statewide testing programs responsible for the defensibility and quality of assessment content, designs, and results. Prior to rejoining NWEA in 2020, Karen served as vice president of learning analytics at Discovery Education and most recently as senior vice president of research and assessment design at Edmentum.

Karen received her BS in psychology and MS in special education from Longwood University in Virginia and her PhD in educational research in measurement from the University of South Carolina.