VEST Education and Research Speaker Series: Andrew Ho

Abstract

Students in many IES-funded predoctoral fellowships like yours are required to take a course in educational measurement. Why? I present a consensus of an NCME Presidential Task Force charged with developing "foundational competencies in educational measurement" (Ackerman et al., 2024 [public]). The framework has three competency domains and five competency subdomains. I provide three examples of "comprehensive examination"-style questions that distinguish among quantitative analysts in education who have and have not yet developed such foundational competencies. I also present ongoing debate about these competencies related to qualitative skills, culturally responsive assessments, and Artificial Intelligence (Ho et al., 2024[public]). 

Speaker Bio

Andrew Ho is the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a psychometrician whose research aims to improve the design, use, and interpretation of test scores in educational policy and practice. Ho is known for his development of methods for measuring educational progress and educational inequality. He is a developer of a national archive of student achievement data (SEDA) and an advocate for using educational tests for low-stakes monitoring in multiple-measures systems. Ho holds his Ph.D. in educational psychology and his M.S. in statistics from Stanford University. Before graduate school, he taught middle school creative writing in his hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii, and high school physics and AP physics in Ojai, California