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.
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 by examining student work directly to assess the achievement of learning outcomes or it is based on data from which one can make inferences about learning. Assessment is often used interchangeably with test but is 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.
Learning styles refer to a range of theories that aim to account for differences in individuals' learning. Although there is ample evidence that individuals express personal preferences on how they prefer to receive information, few studies have found validity in using learning styles in education. Many theories share the proposition that humans can be classified according to their "style" of learning, but differ on how the proposed styles should be defined, categorized and assessed. A common concept is that individuals differ in how they learn.
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.
Gwyneth M. Boodoo is an American psychologist and expert on educational measurement.
The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is a set of testing standards developed jointly by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). The most recent edition, the 7th, is available in a printed form as well as freely downloadable as PDFs in English and Spanish. ePub and PDF eBook formats are also available at.
Formative assessment, formative evaluation, formative feedback, or assessment for learning, including diagnostic testing, is a range of formal and informal assessment procedures conducted by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment. The goal of a formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work. It also helps faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately. It typically involves qualitative feedback for both student and teacher that focuses on the details of content and performance. It is commonly contrasted with summative assessment, which seeks to monitor educational outcomes, often for purposes of external accountability.
Education sciences, also known as education studies, education theory, and traditionally called pedagogy, seek to describe, understand, and prescribe education including education policy. Subfields include comparative education, educational research, instructional theory, curriculum theory and psychology, philosophy, sociology, economics, and history of education. Related are learning theory or cognitive science.
Cognitive skills are skills of the mind, as opposed to other types of skills such as motor skills or social skills. Some examples of cognitive skills are literacy, self-reflection, logical reasoning, abstract thinking, critical thinking, introspection and mental arithmetic. Cognitive skills vary in processing complexity, and can range from more fundamental processes such as perception and various memory functions, to more sophisticated processes such as decision making, problem solving and metacognition.
Norman “Fritz” Frederiksen (1909-1998) was an American research psychologist and leading proponent of performance assessment, an approach to educational and occupational testing that focused on the use of tasks similar to the ones individuals actually encounter in real classroom and work environments. In keeping with the philosophy underlying this approach, Frederiksen was a critic of multiple-choice testing, which he felt negatively influenced school curricula and classroom practice. Much of his research centered upon creating and evaluating alternative approaches to the measurement of knowledge and skill, which he pursued over a 40-year career at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, NJ. For his work, he received the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Contributions to Knowledge in 1984 and, by the time of his retirement from ETS, had attained the position of Distinguished Scientist, the organization's highest-ranking scientific title at that time.
Adaptive comparative judgement is a technique borrowed from psychophysics which is able to generate reliable results for educational assessment – as such it is an alternative to traditional exam script marking. In the approach, judges are presented with pairs of student work and are then asked to choose which is better, one or the other. By means of an iterative and adaptive algorithm, a scaled distribution of student work can then be obtained without reference to criteria.
ACT, Inc. is an American for-profit company primarily known for the ACT, a standardized test designed to assess high school students' academic achievement and college readiness. It was announced in April 2024 that the company, previously a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, had been purchased by the private equity firm Nexus Capital, raising concerns about transparency and accountability.
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.
Lynn Fuchs is an educational psychologist known for research on instructional practice and assessment, reading disabilities, and mathematics disabilities. She is the Dunn Family Chair in Psychoeducational Assessment in the Department of Special Education at Vanderbilt University.
Alina Anca von Davier 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, and Carnegie Mellon University as a Senior Research Fellow.
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.
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.
Matthias von Davier is a psychometrician, academic, inventor, and author. He is the executive director of the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development and the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor in Education at Boston College.
Fumiko Samejima (1930–c2021) was a prominent Japanese-born psychometrician best known for her development of the Graded Response Model (GRM), a fundamental approach in Item Response Theory (IRT). Her innovative methods became influential in psychological and educational measurement, particularly in improving the accuracy of tests involving Likert-scale questions and other graded responses. She published her seminal paper “Estimation of Latent Ability Using a Response Pattern of Graded Scores” in 1969. This publication became a foundational reference in psychometric literature, significantly advancing the analysis of ordered categorical data.
