Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation announces lead psychometrician


LAWRENCE — The Achievement & Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas has announced the hiring of Scott Bishop, an executive from ACT Inc. with nearly two decades of research and development experience in K-12 assessments in a variety of capacities. Bishop will serve as lead psychometrician for AAI’s Center for Educational Testing & Evaluation (CETE).

“We are very excited that Scott Bishop is joining our team as the lead psychometrician,” said CETE Director Marianne Perie. “His breadth of experience working with multiple states using a range of psychometric models will enhance our capacity and allow us to provide a greater depth of expertise to all of our state partners.”

The field of psychometrics applies mathematical models or evaluations to measure psychological or mental processes that can’t be measured directly. Psychometricians assess intelligence or cognitive abilities, aptitudes, interests, personality traits and psychopathologies (mental disorders); they also construct methods and formats for reporting results in meaningful ways.

As CETE’s lead psychometrician, Bishop’s focus is educational achievement testing — identifying the best ways to quantify how much a student has learned. Working with subject-matter experts, he and his team will help design valid, reliable and technically sound general, alternative and alternate assessments that provide evidence of student progress in academic topics such as mathematics, science, English language arts and social studies.

Bishop comes to CETE from ACT Inc., where he served as content lead for K-12 assessment programs. During his career, he has provided technical support to many large-scale norm- and criterion-referenced testing programs. He has also consulted on formative assessment programs, supported the development of several off-the-shelf tests and oversaw a number of special linking and validity studies. Bishop has authored research papers on equating, vertical scaling and differential-item functioning and refereed submitted papers for the National Council on Measurement in Education Conference and the Journal of Educational Measurement. He is former editor of the NCME Newsletter.

Bishop holds a Ph.D. in educational measurement and statistics from the University of Iowa, an Ed.S. and M.Ed. in school psychology from James Madison University, and a B.S. in psychology from Radford University.

CETE develops and administers educational testing programs that translate industry-leading research into real-world solutions. These programs assist teachers in identifying strategies to help their students reach their best potential and make testing accessible and applicable for students of all ability levels. The states of Kansas and Alaska entrust their public-school assessment programs to CETE, as do the 19 member states in the Dynamic Learning Maps Consortium, a CETE-developed alternate-assessment system for students with significant cognitive disabilities.

About the Achievement & Assessment Institute
Established in 2012, AAI is the umbrella organization for four specialized research centers at KU: CETE, Agile Technology Solutions, the Center for Public Partnerships & Research and the Center for Educational Opportunity Programs. Directed by Neal Kingston, professor in the Department of Psychology and Research in Education in the School of Education, AAI builds partnerships, products and programs in educational practice, assessment and evaluation. These initiatives benefit children, adults, communities and publicly funded agencies at the local, state and national levels.

Wed, 09/03/2014

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Bill Woodard

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Bill Woodard

Achievement & Assessment Institute

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