Biographical Sketch

George A. Marcoulides is a distinguished Professor of Research Methodology of the Department of Education at the Gervitz Graduate School of Education and a member of the Quantitative Methodology in Social Sciences Program at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Previously, he was a Professor of Research Methods and Statistics at the University of California in Riverside and a Professor of Statistics at the Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at California State University in Fullerton. Also, he has been a visiting professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, University of California in Irvine, University of Geneva and at the University of London.

George A. Marcoulides has served as a consultant in numerous educational authorities, government agencies, companies (in the United States and abroad) and to various national and multi-national corporations. He has co-authored or co-edited 15 books, edited volumes, published over 200 articles in scholarly journals and books and presented numerous times at national and international conferences. His contributions have received Best Paper Awards from the Academy of Management, the Decision Sciences Institute and the American Educational Research Association - University Council for Educational Administration. He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and a member of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. He is currently one of the editors of the Structural Equation Modeling and Educational and Psychological Measurements journal and of the Quantitative Methodology Book Series and he is on the editorial board of numerous other scholarly journals.

Abstract

New Developments and Techniques in Educational Assessment

New developments and techniques in the field of educational assessment continue to propagate at an incredible rate. Computer information technology has played a key role in changing the overall educational assessment landscape.

This technology is used to administer different types and formats of assessments, for the tailoring of assessments to individual examinees, for the automated scoring of items, for the automated scoring of essays and constructed responses, for the automated evaluation of speech, for the automated development, assembly and banking of new items, and for the development of new algorithms and models to be used in these various assessment applications. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone these days who has not had to deal with at least one of these new technological innovations. Some scholars have described these technological innovations as “providing the greatest promise for furthering ...knowledge”, and as “perhaps the most important and influential... revolution to have occurred...” Unfortunately, the connection between many of these innovations and practice is not always apparent.

This talk will provide an overview of selected educational assessment advances and highlight the link between technological innovation and practice. The talk will also discuss various methodological misunderstandings concerning these innovations that clearly warrant careful consideration in terms of their potential political, economic, and even social ramifications.