AWS Public Sector Blog
How Pearson Clinical Assessments transform school mental health services with AWS
School mental health demand is exploding, but the workforce isn’t growing fast enough to keep up. With close to 8 million students now receiving special education services and only one school psychologist for every 1,065 students, clinicians are often overwhelmed. Budget constraints compound these challenges, creating equity gaps where under-resourced schools can’t afford the same assessment tools as wealthier districts.
Pearson Clinical Assessments, a leader in psychological and educational testing, saw an opportunity to use cloud technology to transform how clinicians assess and support students. Working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Pearson developed two solutions: the Digital Assessment Library for Schools (DALS) and Revibe, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered wearable technology designed to enhance focus and attention. The goal was clear: to help time-pressed clinicians work efficiently while still serving each student as an individual.
The challenge: Demand outpacing workforce capacity
Pearson Clinical Assessments is a division within Pearson, the global learning company, whose mission is to help people achieve the life they imagine through learning. The Clinical Assessments division publishes screeners and assessment tools that school psychologists, speech-language pathologists, and other professionals use to support special education needs and clinical mental health services.
The challenges facing these professionals have reached critical levels. “Demand for mental health services is exploding,” said Clay Richey, managing director at Pearson Clinical Assessments. “The growing prevalence of autism, ADHD, the kinds of support that school psychologists and related professionals are being asked to deliver in school environments are all increasing at accelerated rates, but growth in the number of professionals isn’t keeping pace with demand.”
This workforce shortage places enormous pressure on existing clinicians. Traditional assessment methods created additional barriers. Physical test kits limited flexibility, as not every school had access to every test, and paper-based administration made it difficult for some students to participate. “Anything we can do to help the professional be as efficient with that time as possible and still serve the individual in a personalized way is important,” Richey emphasized. “Technology is an inevitable, important part of that solution.”
Why AWS: Reliability, scalability, and partnership
Assessments inform life-changing decisions about special education services, making reliability non-negotiable. “In general, reliability is a huge concern for us. This is high-stakes testing,” said Dustin Wahlstrom, vice president of technology strategy at Pearson Clinical Assessments. “People depend on us being available, and so we depend on AWS being available.”
As an existing AWS customer, Pearson valued the platform’s robust security and compliance capabilities, as well as its flexibility to scale as new offerings emerged. Pearson maintains Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and SOC 2 standards. AWS provides the infrastructure security foundation through services like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for secure data storage and AWS Fargate for scalable application hosting.
Beyond infrastructure, the partnership brought strategic value. “AWS has been a true partner for us, as opposed to just a transactional vendor,” Wahlstrom said. The AWS “Working Backwards” methodology—starting with customer needs—had a particularly significant influence on Pearson’s approach. “The ethos that goes into how AWS approaches customer need and problem solving is very well aligned with what we’re aspiring to embody,” Richey said.
Digital Assessment Library for Schools: Unlimited access eliminates budget barriers
Launched in 2018, DALS is a district-wide license that provides unlimited access to more than 40 gold-standard assessments. These are delivered through Q-interactive for iPad-based administration and Q-global for web-based scoring and reporting, both of which are supported by AWS services, including Amazon RDS and AWS Fargate.
Rather than maintaining costly physical inventories and forcing budget-based decisions, districts pay a single annual fee based on the number of their students who have an individualized education plan (IEP). This subscription model eliminates the inequity that allows wealthier schools to have more comprehensive assessment tools. Now every school in a participating district has access to the same library, allowing clinicians to make decisions based on student need rather than budget constraints.
The digital format also transformed student engagement. “Kids actually like the testing experience more,” Wahlstrom said. “It feels game-like, and that’s important for several reasons. There’s a stigma associated with traditional assessments. I remember a user telling me that kids used to avoid them in the hallway. Now they come up and ask if they can come back and ‘play those games again.’ That kind of engagement gives clinicians a more accurate view of each student’s strengths and needs.”
Revibe: Continuous behavioral monitoring with AI-powered wearables
Launched in September 2025—just 11 months after the Revibe team joined Pearson in October 2024—the solution addresses behavioral observation challenges through AI-powered wearable technology. Combining Samsung Galaxy Watch hardware with AI analytics on AWS infrastructure, it collects active and passive behavioral data—such as focus rate, response rate, and fidget minutes—while delivering personalized vibration and text reminders to help students improve their attention.
Traditional behavioral assessments rely on subjective observations captured at single points in time. “With Revibe, you’re being assessed in the environment where that behavior matters most,” Wahlstrom said. “It’s an ongoing thing, and so you can start to get way more fine-grained in terms of how behavior changes over time.”
Before launch, Pearson validated Revibe’s patented fidget-detection algorithm through rigorous classroom studies where 30 students participated in simulated three-hour sessions while high-definition cameras captured their movements. Human coders compared the AI’s fidget detection against video footage, training the machine learning model to accurately identify non-productive repetitive movements.
The system captures continuous data on response rates, focus patterns, attention span, and physical activity—streaming this information to AWS cloud services where machine learning algorithms analyze patterns and personalize reminder frequencies. The solution runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), providing scalable hosting that handles variable demand throughout the academic year.
Results: Efficiency, equity, and engagement
The impact has been significant. Districts that adopt DALS demonstrate near-universal renewal rates. “Once customers begin using the library, they want to keep using it,” Wahlstrom said.
Clinicians now make decisions based on clinical need rather than budget constraints. Automated scoring frees professionals from manual calculations, allowing them to focus on students. This time savings extends to deeper family communication about the evaluation process.
The digital tools also helped reduce stigma around assessment, with many students finding iPad-based testing more engaging and approachable. Revibe’s discreet wearable format also helped students with attention challenges feel more empowered and less self-conscious. Objective behavioral data helped clinicians identify patterns they hadn’t seen before, tracking how attention varied by time of day or activity type—insights that informed more targeted interventions.
Lessons from Pearson’s digital transformation
Reflecting on the journey, Richey emphasized that transformations of this scale require true partnerships. “It’s really hard to go through transformations of this nature on your own,” he said. “You need partners. You need a community of collaborators.”
The predictable annual licensing model of DALS delivered unexpected benefits beyond technology. Districts gained better budget visibility and cost containment while maintaining clinical flexibility. The approach also helped accelerate the transition from print to digital formats, as the subscription model removed the financial risk associated with investing in digital tools.
The future: Expanding AI capabilities to support student success
Pearson continues to explore AI innovations to further reduce administrative burdens on clinicians. “Generative AI allows us to handle what we do today in a more scalable, efficient, and consistent way,” Richey said. “It opens up the opportunity to rethink how we support students.”
Tools like Revibe point to where the field is headed. Traditional assessments capture an hour or two of observation in a clinical setting. Continuous monitoring through wearables captures weeks of authentic behavioral data, revealing patterns that snapshots miss. AWS cloud infrastructure enables the continuous analysis and processing of behavioral data, allowing AI to adjust interventions in real time.
For schools facing tight budgets and growing needs, AWS-powered technology addresses a fundamental challenge: how to serve more students without compromising the human touch in care. Learn how AWS can help your organization build scalable, secure education solutions.