Alina von Davier

Last updated
Alina von Davier
Born (1967-09-11) September 11, 1967 (age 56)
NationalityAmerican
Education Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg
Known for Computational Psychometrics, Test Equating, Multistage testing
Scientific career
Fields Psychometrics
Institutions Duolingo, University of Oxford, Carnegie Mellon University
Thesis Tests of Unconfoundedness in Regression Models with Normally Distributed Variables (Berichte aus der Mathematik)  (2001)
Doctoral advisor Norbert Gaffke
Other academic advisors Rolf Steyer

Alina Anca von Davier (born September 11, 1967) is a psychometrician and researcher in computational psychometrics, machine learning, and education. Von Davier is a researcher, innovator, and an executive leader with over 20 years of experience in EdTech and in the assessment industry. She is the Chief of Assessment at Duolingo, where she leads the Duolingo English Test research and development area. She is also the Founder and CEO of EdAstra Tech, a service-oriented EdTech company. In 2022, she joined the University of Oxford as an Honorary Research Fellow, [1] and Carnegie Mellon University as a Senior Research Fellow. [2]

Contents

Education

Von Davier completed a M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1990. In 2000, she earned a doctorate in mathematics from Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. [3] In 2019 she completed classes in an Executive MBA program at Harvard Business School.

Career

As one of the pioneers of the field of computational psychometrics, von Davier has dedicated her career to advancing the field through her work in both academia and industry. She served as Chief Officer at ACT (test) leading ACTNext, an R&D-based innovation division. Prior to this, she worked for 15 years at Educational Testing Service, where her latest position was Senior Center Director. In 2020, she left her position at ACT and joined Duolingo as Chief of Assessment for the Duolingo English Test. [4]

Von Davier has made significant contributions to the field of psychometrics through her work in academic settings. She was the Chair of the Editorial Council of the Psychometric Society, [5] and an associate editor of Psychometrika. She also served as guest editor for both Applied Psychological Measurement and the Journal of Educational Measurement. [6] [7] In 2022 she served as the Chairperson of the global board of directors for the Association of Test Publishers, and was the president of the International Association of Computerized Adaptive Testing from 2019 to 2022.

Von Davier was a member of the Board of Directors for Smart Sparrow, an adaptive learning company from 2018 to 2020. She currently serves as a Director on the Board for MACAT, an education company focused on critical and creative thinking, learning and assessment.

She currently sits on the global board of directors for the Association of Test Publishers and is the president of the International Association of Computerized Adaptive Testing. [8]

Recognition

Von Davier’s work has been widely recognized in the academic community. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Innovator award from the EdTech Digest. [9] In 2020, she received ATP’s Career Award for her contributions to assessment. [10] The American Educational Research Association awarded her the Division D Signification Contribution Educational Measurement and Research Methodology Award for her publications “Computerized Multistage Testing: Theory and Applications” (2014) and an edited volume on test equating, “Statistical Models for Test Equating, Scaling, and Linking” (2011). [11] In 2022 she received the National Council on Measurement in Education's Bradley Hanson award for her work on adaptive testing and for the co-authored book on computer adaptive testing with R. [12]

Selected works

Books and edited volumes

Related Research Articles

Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally covers specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and related activities. Psychometrics is concerned with the objective measurement of latent constructs that cannot be directly observed. Examples of latent constructs include intelligence, introversion, mental disorders, and educational achievement. The levels of individuals on nonobservable latent variables are inferred through mathematical modeling based on what is observed from individuals' responses to items on tests and scales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Educational Testing Service</span> Educational testing and assessment organization

Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, but has a Princeton address.

Educational assessment or educational evaluation is the systematic process of documenting and using empirical data on the knowledge, skill, attitudes, aptitude and beliefs to refine programs and improve student learning. Assessment data can be obtained from directly examining student work to assess the achievement of learning outcomes or can be based on data from which one can make inferences about learning. Assessment is often used interchangeably with test, but not limited to tests. Assessment can focus on the individual learner, the learning community, a course, an academic program, the institution, or the educational system as a whole. The word "assessment" came into use in an educational context after the Second World War.

Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is a form of computer-based test that adapts to the examinee's ability level. For this reason, it has also been called tailored testing. In other words, it is a form of computer-administered test in which the next item or set of items selected to be administered depends on the correctness of the test taker's responses to the most recent items administered.

William Burton Michael, a student of J. P. Guilford, earned his Ph.D. in quantitative psychometric methods from the University of Southern California. He started his teaching career at Princeton University, and in 1952 joined the faculty at University of Southern California, where he received a joint appointment as an associate professor in psychology and education and as the director of the USC Testing Bureau. Michael authored over 500 publications on test construction, measurement and evaluation, and personality assessment. He also co-chaired a joint committee of the American Psychological Association (APA), American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) that published Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, which is the national and international standard of professional guidelines for testing and measurement in research and practice. One of his most widely read books is entitled "Handbook in research and evaluation : a collection of principles, methods, and strategies useful in the planning, design, and evaluation of studies in education and the behavioral sciences".

Quantitative psychology is a field of scientific study that focuses on the mathematical modeling, research design and methodology, and statistical analysis of psychological processes. It includes tests and other devices for measuring cognitive abilities. Quantitative psychologists develop and analyze a wide variety of research methods, including those of psychometrics, a field concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Australian Council for Educational Research</span> Educational research organization

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), established in 1930, is an independent educational research organisation based in Camberwell, Victoria (Melbourne) and with offices in Adelaide, Brisbane, Dubai, Jakarta, London, New Delhi, Perth and Sydney. ACER develops and manages a range of testing and assessment services and conducts research and analysis in the education sector.

A computerized classification test (CCT) refers to, as its name would suggest, a Performance Appraisal System that is administered by computer for the purpose of classifying examinees. The most common CCT is a mastery test where the test classifies examinees as "Pass" or "Fail," but the term also includes tests that classify examinees into more than two categories. While the term may generally be considered to refer to all computer-administered tests for classification, it is usually used to refer to tests that are interactively administered or of variable-length, similar to computerized adaptive testing (CAT). Like CAT, variable-length CCTs can accomplish the goal of the test with a fraction of the number of items used in a conventional fixed-form test.

Multistage testing is an algorithm-based approach to administering tests. It is very similar to computer-adaptive testing in that items are interactively selected for each examinee by the algorithm, but rather than selecting individual items, groups of items are selected, building the test in stages. These groups are called testlets or panels.

Psychometric software is software that is used for psychometric analysis of data from tests, questionnaires, or inventories reflecting latent psychoeducational variables. While some psychometric analyses can be performed with standard statistical software like SPSS, most analyses require specialized tools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Howard Wainer</span>

Howard Charles Wainer is an American statistician, past principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and author, known for his contributions in the fields of statistics, psychometrics, and statistical graphics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Klaus Kubinger</span>

Klaus D. Kubinger, is a psychologist as well as a statistician, professor for psychological assessment at the University of Vienna, Faculty of Psychology. His main research work focuses on fundamental research of assessment processes and on application and advancement of Item response theory models. He is also known as a textbook author of psychological assessment on the one hand and on statistics on the other hand.

The National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) is a U.S. based professional organization for assessment, evaluation, testing, and other aspects of educational measurement. NCME was launched in 1938 and previously operated under the name National Council on Measurements Used in Education.

Lorrie A. Shepard is a University Distinguished Professor of research and evaluation methodology and former Dean of the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. She joined the faculty of CU Boulder in 1974, and was named the dean of the School of Education there in 2001. She retired from her position as School of Education Dean in 2016, but remains a distinguished professor there. She has been the president of the National Academy of Education, the American Educational Research Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. She has also been editor-in-chief of the Journal of Educational Measurement and the American Educational Research Journal. She is known for her work on psychometrics and the use of testing in the educational system. She has also researched the effects of grade retention in schools, and has argued that it is ineffective at improving student performance.

Computational psychometrics is an interdisciplinary field fusing theory-based psychometrics, learning and cognitive sciences, and data-driven AI-based computational models as applied to large-scale/high-dimensional learning, assessment, biometric, or psychological data. Computational psychometrics is frequently concerned with providing actionable and meaningful feedback to individuals based on measurement and analysis of individual differences as they pertain to specific areas of enquiry.

Automatic item generation (AIG), or automated item generation, is a process linking psychometrics with computer programming. It uses a computer algorithm to automatically create test items that are the basic building blocks of a psychological test. The method was first described by John R. Bormuth in the 1960s but was not developed until recently. AIG uses a two-step process: first, a test specialist creates a template called an item model; then, a computer algorithm is developed to generate test items. So, instead of a test specialist writing each individual item, computer algorithms generate families of items from a smaller set of parent item models.

Randy Elliot Bennett is an American educational researcher who specializes in educational assessment. He is currently the Norman O. Frederiksen Chair in Assessment Innovation at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. His research and writing focus on bringing together advances in cognitive science, technology, and measurement to improve teaching and learning. He received the ETS Senior Scientist Award in 1996, the ETS Career Achievement Award in 2005, the Teachers College, Columbia University Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016, Fellow status in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2017, the National Council on Measurement in Education's (NCME) Bradley Hanson Award for Contributions to Educational Measurement in 2019, the E. F. Lindquist Award from AERA and ACT in 2020, and elected membership in the National Academy of Education in 2022. Randy Bennett was elected President of both the International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA), a worldwide organization primarily constituted of governmental and NGO measurement organizations, and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), whose members are employed in universities, testing organizations, state and federal education departments, and school districts.

Mark Daniel Reckase is an educational psychologist and expert on quantitative methods and measurement who is known for his work on computerized adaptive testing, multidimensional item response theory, and standard setting in educational and psychological tests. Reckase is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the College of Education at Michigan State University.

The Duolingo English Test(DET) is a standardized test of English language (similar to TOEFL, IELTS, and TOEIC), designed to be internet- rather than paper-based. DET was developed by Duolingo and grew in popularity and acceptance at universities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The test is used by over 5,000 university admissions offices including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Yale. Ireland accepts the test as part of its student visa program. DET is an online, adaptive test, and uses an algorithm to adapt the difficulty of the test as the test taker progresses. Universities in the UK such as the London School of Economics, Imperial College London, Kingston University, University of Southampton, Middlesex University also accept the Duolingo test.

Jacqueline P. Leighton is a Canadian-Chilean educational psychologist, academic and author. She is a full professor in the Faculty of Education as well as vice-dean of Faculty Development and Faculty Affairs at the University of Alberta.

References

  1. "Dr Alina von Davier" . Retrieved 2023-02-13.
  2. "Duolingo's Alina von Davier joins the Department of Modern Languages" . Retrieved 2023-02-13.
  3. "Universität Magdeburg, Institut für Mathematische Optimierung" (PDF). Retrieved 2020-06-12.
  4. "New Move: Alina von Davier | The PIE News". www.thepienews.com. 14 August 2020. Retrieved 2021-10-23.
  5. "Editorial Council | Psychometric Society". www.psychometricsociety.org. Retrieved 2019-04-01.
  6. von Davier, Alina A.; Liu, Mei (January 2008). "Special Issue". Applied Psychological Measurement. 32 (1): 1–114. ISSN   0146-6216.
  7. von Davier, Alina A. (2017). "Special Issue: Collaborative Educational Assessments". Journal of Educational Measurement. 54 (1): 1–141. ISSN   1745-3984.
  8. "Current IACAT Board | IACAT". www.iacat.org. Retrieved 2019-04-01.
  9. "2019 Award Winners| EdTech Digest". www.edtechdigest.com. Retrieved 2023-02-13.
  10. "2020 ATP Award Winners| ATP". www.atpu.org. Retrieved 2023-02-13.
  11. "Alina von Davier Honored at 2013 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting| PR Newswire". www.prnewswire.com (Press release). Retrieved 2023-02-13.
  12. "2022 NCME Awards | NCME". www.NCME.org. Retrieved 2023-02-13.