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Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop (2010)

Chapter: Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12820.
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Appendix B
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

Henry Braun (Chair) holds the Boisi Chair in Education and Public Policy in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He also serves as distinguished presidential appointee (retired) at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. Among the more recent reports Braun authored or coauthored are Exploring What Works in Science Instruction: A Look at the Eighth Grade Science Classroom (2009), America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing our Nation’s Future (2007), and A Closer Look at Charter Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (2005). He has done considerable work in the area of value-added modeling and authored Using Student Progress to Evaluate Teachers: A Primer on Value-Added Models (2006). He was a program committee member for the 2008 conference on value-added modeling at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Education Research and a contributor the OECD monograph Measuring Improvements in Learning Outcomes: Best Practices to Assess the Value-added of Schools (2008). At the National Research Council, he is a member of the Committee on Incentives and Test–Based Accountability. He has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from McGill University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, both in mathematical statistics, from Stanford University.


Naomi Chudowsky (Costudy Director) has worked on a variety of studies at the National Research Council related to testing and accountability. These include reports on how incentives function in accountability systems, advances in the cognitive sciences and the implications for designing educational assessments, and the redesign of the U.S. naturalization tests.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12820.
×

She is also a consultant who conducts research on testing and accountability for state and national clients. She has researched and written a number of reports on the No Child Left Behind Act for the Center on Education Policy. Previously she worked on test development for President Clinton’s Voluntary National Testing Initiative at the U.S. Department of Education and served as the coordinator of Connecticut’s statewide high school testing program. She has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford University.


Stuart W. Elliott (Senior Program Officer) is director of the Board on Testing and Assessment at the National Research Council, where he has worked on a variety of projects related to assessment, accountability, teacher qualifications, and information technology. Previously, he worked as an economic consultant for several private-sector consulting firms. He was also a research fellow in cognitive psychology and economics at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Jane Hannaway is the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute. She is an organizational sociologist whose work focuses on the study of educational organizations. Her areas of expertise include elementary and secondary schools, employment and education, school and teacher evaluations, standards-based reform, and vouchers. Her recent research focuses on structural reforms in education, particularly reforms promoting accountability, competition, and choice. She was recently appointed director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Databases in Education Research (CALDER) at the Urban Institute. She is a past vice president of the American Educational Research Association and has served on its executive board. She was elected to the Council of the Association for Public Policy and Management. She is past editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the main policy journal of the American Educational Research Association. She is currently on the executive board of the American Education Finance Association. She has a Ph.D. in the sociology of education from Stanford University.


Judith A. Koenig (Costudy Director) is a senior program officer for the Board on Testing and Assessment. Since 1999, she has directed measurement-related studies designed to inform education policy, including studies on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, inclusion of special needs students in assessment programs, developing assessments for state and federal accountability programs, and setting standards for the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. From 1984 to 1999, she worked

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12820.
×

at the Association of American Medical Colleges on the Medical College Admission Test, directing operational programs and leading a comprehensive research program on the examination. Prior to that, she worked for 10 years as a special education teacher and diagnostician. She has a B.A. (1975) in special education from Michigan State University, an M.A. (1984) in psychology from George Mason University, and a Ph.D. (2003) in educational measurement, statistics, and evaluation from the University of Maryland.


Kevin Lang is professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Boston University. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration (University College, London), a fellow of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality (Stanford University), and a long-time member of the advisory board of the Canadian Employment Research Forum. He is a coeditor of Labor Economics, the journal of the European Association of Labor Economists. He was an editor of the monograph series Sociology and Economics: Controversy and Integration. At the National Research Council, he is a member of the Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability. He has a B.A. in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University, an M.Sc. in economics from the University of Montreal, and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Scott F. Marion is vice president of the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, Inc. He consults with numerous states on such issues as optimal design of assessment and accountability systems, creating or documenting legally defensible approaches to accountability, gathering validation evidence for accountability programs, and designing programs to support low-performing schools. Previously, he served as Wyoming’s assessment director (1999-2003), where he managed the K-12 testing program, the Wyoming Comprehensive Assessment System, overseeing the state’s Uniform Reporting System, and generally overseeing all assessment-related activities at the Wyoming Department of Education. He has an M.S. in science and environmental education from the University of Maine and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado.


Loretta A. Shepard is professor of education and chair of the Research and Evaluation Methodology program area at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also currently dean of the School of Education. She was elected to the National Academy of Education in 1992 and is its current president. Her research focuses on psychometrics and the use and misuse of tests in educational settings. She is a past president of the American Educational Research Association and past president of the

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12820.
×

National Council on Measurement in Education; in 1999 she won the latter’s Award for Career Contributions to Educational Measurement. She has been editor of the Journal of Educational Measurement and the American Educational Research Journal and interim editor of Educational Researcher. At the National Research Council, she is a member of the Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability and has served on the Center for Education advisory board, the Board on Testing and Assessment, and the Committee on Assessment in Support of Learning and Instruction. She has a B.A. in history from Pomona College and an M.A. in counseling and a Ph.D. in research and evaluation methodology from the University of Colorado at Boulder.


Judith D. Singer is the James Bryant Conant professor of education and former academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her professional life focuses on improving the quantitative methods used in social, educational, and behavioral research. She is primarily known for her contributions to the practice of multilevel modeling, survival analysis, and individual growth modeling and to making these and other statistical methods accessible to empirical researchers. Her most recent book with longtime collaborator John B. Willett is Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence, for which they received honorable mention from the Association of American Publishers for the best mathematics and statistics book of 2003. At the National Research Council, she was a member of the Committee on Promising Education Practices, and she participated in the Workshop on the Use of School-Level Assessment Data. She is also a member of the National Academy of Education. She has a Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University.


Mark R. Wilson is a professor of policy, organization, measurement, and evaluation cognition and development in the Graduate School of Education at University of California, Berkeley. He is also the developer of the Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research Center. His research focuses on educational measurement, survey sampling techniques, modeling, assessment design, and applied statistics. He currently advises the California State Department of Education on assessment issues as a member of the Technical Study Group. He has recently published books on item response theory and issues relating to the relationships between large-scale assessment and classroom-level assessment. He is founding editor of the new journal Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives. At the National Research Council, he served on the Committee on the Foundations of Assessment, and he chaired the Committee on Test Design for K-12 Science Achievement. He has a Ph.D. in measurement and education statistics from the University of Chicago.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12820.
×
Page 79
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12820.
×
Page 80
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12820.
×
Page 81
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Getting Value Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12820.
×
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Value-added methods refer to efforts to estimate the relative contributions of specific teachers, schools, or programs to student test performance. In recent years, these methods have attracted considerable attention because of their potential applicability for educational accountability, teacher pay-for-performance systems, school and teacher improvement, program evaluation, and research. Value-added methods involve complex statistical models applied to test data of varying quality. Accordingly, there are many technical challenges to ascertaining the degree to which the output of these models provides the desired estimates. Despite a substantial amount of research over the last decade and a half, overcoming these challenges has proven to be very difficult, and many questions remain unanswered--at a time when there is strong interest in implementing value-added models in a variety of settings.

The National Research Council and the National Academy of Education held a workshop, summarized in this volume, to help identify areas of emerging consensus and areas of disagreement regarding appropriate uses of value-added methods, in an effort to provide research-based guidance to policy makers who are facing decisions about whether to proceed in this direction.

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