David Thissen

Last updated
David Thissen
Bornc. 1950 (age 7374)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Saint Louis University
University of Chicago
Known for Item response theory
Unit-weighted regression
Test Scoring
Awards American Statistical Association Fellow (2006)
AERA Inaugural Fellow (2008)
NCME Career Contribution Award (2015)
Scientific career
Fields Psychometrics
Institutions University of Kansas
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Doctoral advisor R. Darrell Bock
Doctoral students Bryce Reeve
Li Cai

David Michael Thissen (born c. 1950) is an emeritus professor of quantitative psychology at the University of North Carolina and former President of the Psychometric Society. [1] He is a fellow at the American Statistical Association and the American Psychological Society.

Contents

Early life and education

The eldest of five children, Thissen graduated from St. Edmond High School in Fort Dodge, Iowa and was a national semifinalist in the 1967 Westinghouse Science Talent Search. [2] He earned a bachelor's degree from Saint Louis University and a PhD in quantitative psychology from the University of Chicago, where he was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Career

Upon receiving his PhD in 1976, Thissen joined the psychology faculty at the University of Kansas and was appointed an associate professor (with tenure) five years later. He moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1990 as a full professor of psychology and served as the chair of the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory until 2002. He continues to work at UNC as a full professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. He published Test Scoring with Howard Wainer in 2001.[ citation needed ]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

Louis Leon Thurstone was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contributions to factor analysis. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thurstone as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

Stanley Allen Mulaik is Professor Emeritus (retired) at the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as the head of the Societate American pro Interlingua. Although born in Edinburg, Mulaik lived in Salt Lake City, Utah from 1939 to 1966. For the last 42 years, he has lived in or around the Atlanta, Georgia area. He has two sons who live with their families in the Atlanta area.

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">John L. Horn</span>

John Leonard Horn was a scholar, cognitive psychologist and a pioneer in developing theories of intelligence. The Cattell-Horn- Carroll (CHC) theory is the basis for many modern IQ tests. Horn's parallel analysis, a method for determining the number of factors to keep in an exploratory factor analysis, is also named after him.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Friendly</span>

Michael Louis Friendly is an American-Canadian psychologist, Professor of Psychology at York University in Ontario, Canada, and director of its Statistical Consulting Service, especially known for his contributions to graphical methods for categorical and multivariate data, and on the history of data and information visualisation.

The Psychometric Society is an international nonprofit professional organization devoted to the advancement of quantitative measurement practices in psychology, education, and the social sciences. The society publishes a scientific journal called Psychometrika, concentrating on the area of statistics. The society also conducts an annual scientific meeting.

David Budescu is a psychologist and academic. He is the Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology at Fordham University.

<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.

Kenneth A. Bollen is the Henry Rudolf Immerwahr Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bollen joined UNC-Chapel Hill in 1985. He is also a member of the faculty in the Quantitative Psychology Program housed in the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory. He is a fellow at the Carolina Population Center, the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also the Director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science from 2000 to 2010. His specialties are population studies and cross-national analyses of democratization.

Dorothy Christina Adkins was an American psychologist. Adkins is best known for her work in psychometrics and education testing, particularly in achievement testing. She was the first female president of the Psychometric Society and served in several roles in the American Psychological Association.

Ben James Winer was an American research psychologist and academic. He served as a psychology professor at Purdue University and was president of the Psychometric Society. He has been listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists in the United States, having authored a well-known textbook on statistical analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Youngstrom</span> American psychologist

Eric Arden Youngstrom is an American clinical child and adolescent psychologist, professor of psychology and neuroscience, and psychiatry, at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. His research focuses on evidence-based assessment, and assessment of bipolar disorder across the life span.

Thelma Gwinn Thurstone was a U.S. psychologist.

Li Cai is a statistician and quantitative psychologist. He is a professor of Advanced Quantitative Methodology at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies with a joint appointment in the quantitative area of the UCLA Department of Psychology. He is also Director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, Managing Partner at Vector Psychometric Group.

Bryce Byrum Reeve III is an American psychometrician, outcomes research scientist, professor of Health Policy and Management at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and faculty expert at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is a prominent figure in quantitative research on improving the measurement of patient-reported health outcomes.

Patrick James Curran is an American psychologist and statistician. He is a professor of quantitative psychology at the University of North Carolina, where he is also a faculty member at the Center for Developmental Science.

Daniel John Bauer is an American statistician, professor, and director of the quantitative psychology program at the University of North Carolina, where he is also on the faculty at the Center for Developmental Science. He is known for rigorous methodological work on latent variable models and is a proponent of integrative data analysis, a meta-analytic technique that pools raw data across multiple independent studies.

Rebecca Zwick is an American statistician and researcher in educational assessment and psychometrics. She is a professor emeritus in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of a book on university and college admission, Who Gets In? Strategies for Fair and Effective College Admissions.

Lyle Vincent Jones was an American psychologist known for his pioneering work in psychometrics. He was an early architect of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

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.

References

  1. "Past, Present and Incoming Presidents". psychometricsociety.org. Psychometric Society. Retrieved 7 March 2017.
  2. The Messenger, Jan. 26, 1967 archive. Accessed March 15, 2017.