Howard Wainer

Last updated
Howard Wainer
HWainer.jpg
Born (1943-10-26) October 26, 1943 (age 79)
Brooklyn, New York
Nationality American
Alma mater Princeton University
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Known for Unit-weighted regression
Scientific career
Fields Statistics
Institutions University of Pennsylvania
University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor Harold Gulliksen
Doctoral students David Thissen

Howard Wainer (born 1943) 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.

Contents

Biography

Early life

Howard Wainer was born Howard Charles Goldhaber in Brooklyn, New York on October 26, 1943. In 1948 his father Meyer Goldhaber, an anatomist by education and a dentist by profession, died of complications from a bleeding ulcer at the age of 35. Howard, his brother and his mother moved in with his mother's parents. After two years his mother married Sam Wainer, a local businessman, and the family relocated to Long Island. Howard was formally adopted by his mother's new husband and took the surname Wainer. [1]

Education

Early on Wainer showed an aptitude for science and mathematics. In 1960, at the end of his junior year in high school, he was accepted into a National Science Foundation honors program at Columbia University. He spent two hours traveling on subway and bus each way to and from Columbia, learning about Markov chains and number theory in the morning and working on the IBM 650 computer in the afternoon. [1]

Wainer's experiences at Columbia motivated him to continue his studies along similar lines. He matriculated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1961 to study mathematics. It was at R.P.I. that Wainer first encountered psychometrics. There, Professor George Boguslavsky was so impressed with his abilities and enthusiasm that he recommended Wainer for a Psychometric Fellowship at Princeton University under Harold Gulliksen. [2] Wainer received his B.S. from R.P.I. in mathematics in 1965 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in psychometrics in 1968. [3]

Career

Howard Wainer began his teaching career at Temple University in 1968, staying on as an assistant professor until 1970. [4] After Temple he taught at the University of Chicago, as a member of the Committee on Methodology in the department of Behavioral Sciences until 1977. [5] Wainer then moved to Washington, D.C., to join the Bureau of Social Science Research, a nonprofit organization that focused on policy research. During his time in DC Wainer also joined with Richard Roistacher and Barbara Noble in founding Multiple Technical Services, a small firm that provided statistical and computational advice to the DC research community. In 1980 he moved to Princeton NJ to become a principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, a position he held for 21 years. In 2001 he assumed the position of Distinguished Research Scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners, from which he retired on December 2, 2016. Wainer was also an adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 2002 until 2013. [3]

Awards and honors

Howard Wainer is the recipient of numerous awards and honors: He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Educational Research Association. He was given a Career Achievement Award for Contributions to Educational Measurement by the National Council on Measurement in Education in 2007, the Samuel J. Messick Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from Division 5 of the American Psychological Association in 2009, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Psychometric Society in 2013. He also received the ACT/AERA E. F. Lindquist Award for Outstanding Research in Testing & Measurement in 2015. His work on testlets was recognized when he received the Award for Scientific Contribution to a Field of Educational Measurement from the National Council on Measurement in Education in 2006. His book Graphic Discovery was named by Choice as the “Best Math book of 2005”. He was a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, and the American College Testing organization. He also received the Educational Testing Service’s Senior Scientist Award in 1990.

Current status

Howard Wainer lives with his wife, Linda Steinberg, in Pennington, New Jersey.

Work

Contributions to statistics

Since 1974 when he published his first article on statistical graphics, an empirical verification of the efficacy of the suspended Rootogram, Howard Wainer has been a tireless advocate for the efficacy of graphics for communicating quantitative phenomena. He is one of the principals responsible for the renewed importance of graphics in statistics. In addition to the three books he authored on graphical methods: Picturing the Uncertain World, [6] Graphic Discovery [7] and Visual Revelations [8] he was also responsible for the English translation of two of the masterworks in the field by the French semiologist Jacques Bertin. [9] [10]

Wainer’s approach to the study of graphics has always shown a deep respect for the work of those who had preceded him. In 2007 he arranged for the publication of replica volumes of William Playfair's Atlas as well as his Statistical Breviary, the first books on the subject. In them he collaborated with Ian Spence on an extended introduction to Playfair and a biography of him. [11]

Wainer has done extensive work on problems in psychometrics. He has authored, co-authored or edited the principal texts in five of the major areas of the subject: test scoring, [12] test validity, [13] computerized adaptive testing, [14] test fairness, [15] and, most recently, on a theory of testlets. [16]

Wainer has published more than 450 articles, chapters and books. His latest book Truth or Truthiness [17] explains how to use evidence to debunk baseless claims. Since 1990 Wainer has written the popular column “Visual Revelations” for Chance magazine. Wainer edited the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics from 2002 through 2004 as well as being an associate editor of a handful of statistical and psychometric journals. He is currently on the Board of Editors of Significance, the new joint publication of the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society.

He has also served on the front lines of educational practice by working for many years as a consultant for teachers’ unions, with a five-year hiatus when he served on the Princeton Board of Education. He has also served, in many capacities, as a consultant and advisor to government and industry.

Selected publications

See References for other publications

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Psychological statistics</span>

Psychological statistics is application of formulas, theorems, numbers and laws to psychology. Statistical methods for psychology include development and application statistical theory and methods for modeling psychological data. These methods include psychometrics, factor analysis, experimental designs, and Bayesian statistics. The article also discusses journals in the same field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Psychometrics</span> Theory and technique of psychological measurement

Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally refers to 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 nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, but has a Princeton address.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Playfair</span> British polymath

William Playfair, a Scottish engineer and political economist, served as a secret agent on behalf of Great Britain during its war with France. The founder of graphical methods of statistics, Playfair invented several types of diagrams: in 1786 the line, area and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 the pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations. As a secret agent, Playfair reported on the French Revolution and organized a clandestine counterfeiting operation in 1793 to collapse the French currency.

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.

Norman Cliff is an American psychologist. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in psychometrics in 1957. After research positions in the US Public Health Service and at Educational Testing Service he joined the University of Southern California in 1962. He has had a number of research interests, including quantification of cognitive processes, scaling and measurement theory, computer-interactive psychological measurement, multivariate statistics, and ordinal methods. One of his major contributions to psychometrics was the method for rotation of canonical components. Asserting that much of psychological data have only ordinal justification, Cliff also published various papers and a book on ordinal methods for research. On the one hand this included extensions to the established ordinal methods for correlating data. However, on the other hand, Cliff also suggested that there are viable and robust ordinal alternatives to mean comparisons. He introduced a measure of proportional difference between two sets of data often referred to as Cliff's delta. He has been president of the Psychometric Society and of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology. Now an Emeritus Professor, he lives in New Mexico.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantitative psychology</span> Field of scientific study

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.

Nancy Cole is an educational psychologist and expert on educational assessment. Cole is past president of the American Educational Research Association and the Educational Testing Service (ETS), and former Dean of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of North Carolina. Her undergraduate education in psychology was at Rice University.

A computerized classification test (CCT) refers to, as its name would suggest, a test 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.

Robyn Mason Dawes was an American psychologist who specialized in the field of human judgment. His research interests included human irrationality, human cooperation, intuitive expertise, and the United States AIDS policy. He applied linear models to human decision making, including models with equal weights, a method known as unit-weighted regression. He co-wrote an early textbook on mathematical psychology.

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.

<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.

Jingle-jangle fallacies are erroneous assumptions that either two different things are the same because they bear the same name ; or two identical or almost identical things are different because they are labeled differently. In research, a jangle fallacy is the inference that two measures with different names measure different constructs. By comparison, a jingle fallacy is the assumption that two measures which are called by the same name capture the same construct.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Howard G. Funkhouser</span> American mathematician and historian

Howard Gray Funkhouser was an American mathematician, historian and Associate Professor of Mathematics at the Washington and Lee University, and later at the Phillips Exeter Academy, particularly known for his early work on the history of graphical methods.

Ian Spence is a Scottish-Canadian psychologist, and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, known for his work on graphical perception, psychometric methods and the history of statistical graphics, specifically on the life and work of William Playfair.

David Michael Thissen is an emeritus professor of quantitative psychology at the University of North Carolina and former President of the Psychometric Society. He is a fellow at the American Statistical Association and the American Psychological Society. He is known for his contributions to item response theory.

Eric Thomas Bradlow is K.P. Chao Professor, Professor of Marketing, Statistics, Education and Economics, Chairperson Wharton Marketing Department, and Vice-Dean of Analytics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is known for his work on marketing research methods, missing data problems, and psychometrics. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and a fellow the American Education Research Association. Professor Bradlow is also co-founder of GBH Insights, a leading data-focused marketing strategy and insights firm that caters to Fortune 500 companies.

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.

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.

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.

References

  1. 1 2 "Profiles in Research". Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. 30 (4): 466. December 21, 2005.
  2. ↑ J. Ed, Behav. Stats. , p. 468
  3. 1 2 J. Ed, Behav. Stats. , p. 465
  4. ↑ J. Ed, Behav. Stats. , p. 471
  5. ↑ J. Ed, Behav. Stats. , p. 472
  6. ↑ Wainer, Howard (2009). Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN   978-0691152677.
  7. ↑ Wainer, Howard (2005). Graphic Discovery: A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN   0521855543.
  8. ↑ Wainer, Howard (1997). Visual Revelations: Graphical Tales of Fate and Deception from Napoleon Bonaparte to Ross Perot ((second edition, Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000 ed.). New York: Copernicus Books.
  9. ↑ Bertin, Jacques (1983). Semiology of Graphics . Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
  10. ↑ Bertin, Jacques (1981). Graphics and Graphic Information Processing. Elmsford, N. Y.: Walter de Gruyter.
  11. ↑ William Playfair (2007). Howard Wainer; Ian Spence (eds.). The Commercial and Political Atlas, Representing, by means of Stained Copper-Plate Charts, The Progress of the Commerce, Revenues, Expenditure, and Debts of England, during the whole of the Eighteenth Century, and The Statistical Breviary; Shewing on a Principle entirely new, the resources of every state and kingdom in Europe; illustrated with Stained Copper-Plate Charts, representing the physical powers of each distinct nation with ease and perspicuity both. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  12. ↑ Wainer, Howard (2001). Test Scoring. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN   0805837663.
  13. ↑ Wainer, Howard (1988). Test Validity. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  14. ↑ Computerized Adaptive Testing
  15. ↑ Wainer, Howard (1993). Differential Item Functioning. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  16. ↑ Wainer, Howard (2007). Testlet Response Theory and its Applications. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0521681261.
  17. ↑ Wainer, Howard (2016). Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think like a Data Scientist. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-1107130579.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.