The Future of Standardized Assessment

Dr. Daniel McCaffrey, Frederic Lord Chair of Measurement and Statistics in the ETS Research Institute, will discuss the current trends in standardized testing and leverage these to make conjectures about the possible future for standardized assessment. In particular, he will discuss the role AI and large-language models are playing in assessment and learning research and practices, and what this might mean for the future, including defining and ensuring ethical use of AI.

McCaffrey will also discuss issues about skills that will be assessed and touch on issues of U.S. federal and state policies for testing elementary and secondary students, as well as international assessment of school students.

This webinar is hosted by the RAND Statistics Group.

Photo by smolaw11/Adobe Stock

About the Speaker

Daniel McCaffrey, Ph.D. is the Frederic Lord Chair of Measurement and Statistics in the ETS Research Institute. He conducts research on topics related to statistical and psychometric applications and methodology, policy, and computer automated constructed response scoring. He leads a team of psychometricians and analysts who conduct analysis for the National Assessment and Educational Progress and international large-scale assessments and a group researchers working on innovations in the practice and methods of large-scale, survey-based assessments.

Prior to his appointment as the Lord Chair in April 2023, he was Associate Vice President of Psychometric Analysis and Research at ETS where led the team of over 150 psychometricians and data analysts who conducted the essential psychometric analyses for all ETS products and major contracts including the National Assessment of Education Progress and the Programme for International Student Assessment.

McCaffrey is a widely cited researcher with over 250 published articles, chapters, and reports. He is a is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. His areas of expertise include value-added modeling of teacher and school effects using student achievement data, measuring student achievement growth, causal inference, and methods to account for measurement error in secondary data analysis, including causal modeling. His current research includes the evaluation and the use of computer-generated automated scores of constructed responses to test items.

He has served on numerous advisory boards for state departments of education and the United State Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences. He co-led the ETS’s Constructed Response Scoring Technical Advisory Committee from 2017 to 2024. He is currently the Eignor Executive Editor of the ETS Research Report Series and previously was coeditor of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics for five years, and one of the founding editors of Statistics, Politics, and Policy.

McCaffrey received his Ph.D. in Statistics from North Carolina State University in 1991 and his B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Mount Saint Mary’s College in 1986. He joined ETS in 2013 after over 20 years conducting policy research at RAND.

Contact

Contact Cheryl Patalano with questions about the event.