Graduate Student Advisory Committee
Educational Measurement & Statistics
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Graduate Student Advisory CommitteeEducational Measurement & Statistics |
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Information On Program AlumniListed below is information that program alumni have supplied us. Many new and perspective students have wondered what people from our program do once they graduate. If contact information has been supplied, please feel free to contact the alumni if you would like more information. Just click on the name and it will take you to that person's information. Or scroll down and read everyone's. Alvaro Arce-Ferrer - Harcourt Assessment Amy Hendrickson - University of Maryland Pui-Wa Lei - Pennsylvania State University Katie Mohasci - Pearson Educational Measurement, Iowa City, Iowa Stephanie Siddens - Independent Practice & Wooster College Sigurgrímur Skúlason - Educational Testing Institute (Námsmatsstofnun), Reykjavik, Iceland Ye Tong - Pearson Educational Measurement, Iowa City, Iowa
Harcourt Assessment, Inc. Ph.D. (1998) Educational Measurement and Statistics The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa Perform psychometric work and research services for state and catalog Provide psychometric and research services for States assessment programs University of Maryland I graduated in May, 2002 and came directly to the University of Maryland, where I currently am an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation. We are housed within the College of Education. I teach two classes a semester and these have included Introductory Statistics, ANOVA design, Introductory Measurement, Equating, and Test Development. Now that I have taught these classes more than once, I spend a lot less time on class preparation, but I still spend at least a day and a half each week on each class grading (LOTS of grading), meeting with students and responding to email, making handouts, and developing new materials. I have been on several department and college committees, including the department's examination committee (developing and overseeing students' preliminary and comprehensive Finally, I try to save a day a week to work on my own research. I have 3 students now helping me with this work, so we meet regularly. I spend this time reading, writing, and editing papers that I am working on. I review articles for journals and conferences. I have started including my graduate students in this process, by meeting with them in a group to discuss the paper. I was the director of analysis for a project with a research center associated with my department. My role was to supervise students in conducting the analysis as well as writing up some of the results and participating in meetings associated with the project. People say it’s great to have an academic job because you only work 9 months out of the year. However, they fail to realize that then you only get paid for 9 months. So, I have earned my living summers by teaching one or two classes, teaching a 3-day course as part of our certificate program, and working on funded research projects. There’s a lot of flexibility in the job in terms of when you do your work and what you do for work. As my department chair states, everyone is their own island in academia, though this may be more so in my department than in others. Pennsylvania State University Graduated in 2001 with a Ph.D. in Educational Measurement & Statistics Currently a professor at Penn State. Had an internship at ACT and Post-doc at The University of Iowa. Pearson Educational Measurement Iowa City, Iowa In May 2004, I graduated from the University of Iowa with a MA in Educational Measurement and Statistics. My primary responsibilities as a Mathematics Associate Content Specialist at Pearson Educational Measurement encompass item development and test construction. Prior to joining Pearson, I was a Mathematics Test Development Associate at ACT where I developed items for grades 3 through 8. Independent Practice & Wooster College Evaluation Specialist I graduated from the educational psychology PhD program at University of Iowa in December 1999. My advisor was Dr. Don Yarbrough and I worked for him as a research assistant for five years in the Center for Evaluation and Assessment while in graduate school. Beginning in June of 1999, I worked four years for Fairfax County Public Schools ( Virginia suburbs of DC) as a program evaluation specialist. There I engaged in evaluation studies of multi-year pilot K-12 programs. I then became the Supervisor of Program Evaluation for Prince William County Public Schools ( Manassas, Virginia), a neighboring school system, where I coordinated an Office of Program Evaluation for two years. Beginning this academic year (05-06), my husband accepted a tenure track faculty appointment at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio where we relocated in July. Here I am engaging in multiple activities. I am working as the assessment and evaluation specialist for The College of Wooster where I conduct higher education assessment, as well as program evaluation of special projects and programs. I am also working as an independent consultant in program evaluation and assessment. In spring and summer quarters of 2006, I will be teaching graduate courses in program evaluation at Ohio State University in their Quantitative, Research, Evaluation, and Measurement in Education program. As for advice related to the program evaluation component of the program-- I think the series of courses offered when I was there were excellent. There was an intro course, a seminar on the theory of program evaluation, and I believe a practicum. If not already done, it might be helpful for students, as part of a class, to hear from people practicing program evaluation in different organizations (State Dept. of Ed, school system, health industry, etc). Students should do whatever they can to gain applied experiences in conducting evaluation. Program evaluation does not just require knowledge of research methodology and design of experiments, but it also requires awareness of the political context of a program and skills in working with people that know very little about evaluation. This is difficult to learn in a classroom or from a text book. The most ideal activity would be for students to work as a research assistant in a place like UI's Center for Evaluation and Assessment or work with a professor that engages in such studies so that you can work with program staff and experience the context of a program. I have been part of several job searches for program evaluators. For those coming out of graduate school, what sets the qualified candidates apart from those that are less so, are those that can describe applied evaluation experiences in their cover letters and CVs.Educational Testing Institute (Námsmatsstofnun) Borgartún 7a 105 Reykjavík Iceland BA – 1993 Psychology; University of Iceland, Reykjavik MA – 1998 Educational measurement and statistics; University of Iowa Ph.D. – 2004 Educational measurement and evaluation; University of Iowa
I studied at the University of Iowa from 1994-2000. Completing my MA in 1998 and my Ph.D. in 2004. I started working at the Educational Testing Institute (Námsmatsstofnun) in Reykjavik, Iceland, at the beginning of 2000. I head the Department of National Testing. Most of my work concerns the Icelandic National Testing programs (INE). My tasks include everything from test construction to equating and reporting, among them many types of statistical or psychometric analyses, test scoring, equating, planning and design of new tests, test construction, training of item writers, item review, as well as report writing and communicating with schools and political authorities. The INE has three parts and I am involved to some degree in all of them. The first is the assessment of 4th and 7th grade student’s achievement in math and language arts. This part is low stakes and its purpose is primarily informative. Secondly, there is the assessment of 10th grade students in six subjects (language arts, math, English as a foreign language, Danish as a foreign language, science (starting in 2002), social sciences (starting in 2003)). Finally, there is the recent high school level program (starting in 2004) which is held in language arts, math and English as a foreign language. Apart from the INE I have been involved in various research and test translation/adaptation projects. For example I’m responsible for psychometric and statistical work on the Icelandic translation/adaptation of WISC-IV (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, IV) that will be published this fall, and I’ve recently been involved in research on effects of teacher strikes on students, bullying, test translation/adaptation, and some psychometric analyses for the Icelandic PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) research teams. Pearson Educational Measurement I graduated from the University of Iowa in May 2005. Upon graduation, I started working with Pearson Educational Measurement and have been enjoying my job ever since. Pearson primarily works with state assessment and as a psychometrician, my job involves a variety of psychometric tasks. Those tasks include proposal development, test build, item calibration, test equating, vertical scaling, pilot item analysis, data review, standard setting, technical manual, etc. The model we adopt at Pearson includes 75% fulfillment work and 25% research. So in addition to the variety of operational work, I also get to work on research projects. I feel the training I received from the University really helped prepare me for the variety of tasks required at work. I was able to pick up things quickly and significantly contribute to the types of work at Pearson. |
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