Jonathan Schmidgall is a senior research scientist in the ETS Research Institute. He has over 15 years of experience working with language assessments in academic and workplace contexts. Since 2015, he has been the research coordinator for the TOEIC tests, which are used by more than 14,000 organizations across more than 160 countries to assess English skills in everyday and workplace contexts.
As an applied linguist and language testing researcher, Jonathan has focused on oral proficiency, communicative effectiveness, and the use of English in higher education and international workplace contexts. He has published widely on the topics of language test design, scoring, test quality (e.g., reliability, validity, fairness), and the effective use of assessment (e.g., standard setting). He received his Ph.D. in applied linguistics with a focus on language assessment from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a certificate in advanced quantitative methodology in educational research from the Institute of Educational Sciences (IES) within the US Department of Education. He serves on the editorial board of the flagship journals in language assessment, Language Testing and Language Assessment Quarterly.
Last updated: 1/30/2026