Erin Buchanan, M.A.

Erin Buchanan, M.A., is a Senior Associate at edCount, LLC. Ms. Buchanan has over a decade of experience in instruction, curriculum, and assessment development. Ms. Buchanan contributes to edCount’s organizational objectives through intellectual engagement, technical expertise, and management of staff and company resources. Ms. Buchanan plays a key role in the management of projects and serves as an ELA content specialist. She has extensive experience developing and reviewing item specifications, stimuli, items, art, rubrics, annotated scoring sets, and training materials, and has constructed operational, embedded field test, and stand-alone field test forms. She has served as both facilitator and participant on item review and focus group panels for multiple general and alternate assessments in English language arts at grades 3–8 and high school. Ms. Buchanan led the development of a technology-enhanced curriculum and assessment package for grade 1 in English language arts for the K–12 Open Education Resources (OER) Collaborative, a consortium of 13 states aimed at creating comprehensive, high-quality, open educational resources for teachers and students in English language arts and mathematics.

Ms. Buchanan has extensive experience developing curricula and performance task assessments using a backward design approach. Ms. Buchanan served as the Project Director on two federally funded grants, Strengthening Claims-based Interpretations and Uses of Local and Large-scale Science Assessment Scores (SCILLSS) project and the Stackable, Instructionally-embedded, Portable Science (SIPS) Assessments project.  Both projects involve several state and organizational partners and include the application of a principled-design approach for the development of three-dimensional large-scale and classroom-embedded science assessment tasks.

Prior to joining edCount, Ms. Buchanan served as ELA Content Lead for Pearson for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessment, and as a Language Arts Content Specialist in the Standards and Assessment Division for the Wyoming Department of Education. She also served as a member of the Wyoming Standards Revision Steering Committee and facilitated the revision of the Wyoming English Language Arts Content and Performance Standards. Ms. Buchanan has four years of elementary school teaching experience in Michigan Public Schools, where she developed and delivered curriculum, served on the Language Arts District Curriculum Mapping Committee, and was awarded a technology mini-grant for her use of the SMART Board in classrooms.

Ms. Buchanan received her M.A. in Curriculum and Instruction and her B.A. in Elementary Education from Michigan State University.