ETS Researchers Win National Awards for Contributions to Educational Research and Measurement

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Princeton, N.J. (April 23, 2009) —

Five Educational Testing Service (ETS) researchers and psychometricians won prestigious national awards at the joint annual meetings of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), April 13–17 in San Diego, Calif.

The recipients were Shelby Haberman, Director of ETS’s Research Center on Statistics and Psychometric Theory and Practice, Sandip Sinharay, a Senior Research Scientist in the Center, Gautam Puhan, a Manager of Psychometrics, Deping Li, an Associate Psychometrician, and Yanlin Jiang, a Psychometrician. All the recipients are members of ETS’s Research & Development Division. 

“ETS is especially honored that NCME has chosen to recognize our talented research scientists and psychometricians,” says Ida Lawrence, Senior Vice President of Research & Development at ETS. “Like NCME, ETS also seeks to advance the science of measurement in the field of education by using our knowledge and expertise to improve the assessment of individuals and educational programs. The outstanding contributions this year’s award winners are making to the field exemplify ETS’s commitment to the highest-quality research, which is the foundation for all we do.”

Haberman, Sinharay and Puhan received the 2009 NCME Award for Technical or Scientific Contributions to the Field of Educational Measurement. They are being honored for their research on the reporting of subscores based on Classical Test Theory. This research suggested new techniques to ensure that subscores reported by testing programs satisfy professional standards. The research has resulted in seven ETS research publications, four articles in professional journals, and two invited NCME presentations.

Li and Jiang received the 2009 NCME Alicia Cascallar Award. This award recognizes an outstanding paper by an early career scholar. They and a non-ETS colleague were honored for their paper on score scale stability. How well a score scale maintains its meaning over time has implications for generating accurate score distributions and for score reporting. Their paper investigated two methods of ensuring scale stability and identified which method was better. The results can serve as a general guideline for a testing program to monitor scale stability.

About ETS

At nonprofit ETS, we advance quality and equity in education for people worldwide by creating assessments based on rigorous research. ETS serves individuals, educational institutions and government agencies by providing customized solutions for teacher certification, English language learning, and elementary, secondary and post-secondary education, as well as conducting education research, analysis and policy studies. Founded in 1947, ETS develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually — including the TOEFL® and TOEIC® tests, the GRE® test and The Praxis Series™ assessments — in more than 180 countries, at over 9,000 locations worldwide.