School of Education

I am a Professor in Educational Inquiry at Indiana University. Prior to IU I was a Professor of Education at the Center for Educational Measurement (CEMO) at the University of Oslo, Norway. I also worked as a researcher for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in Hamburg Germany. I earned my PhD in educational policy with a research specialization in evaluation from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

My research is focused in the area of educational policy and educational assessment with specific emphasis on international large-scale assessment. My research focuses on how large-scale assessments are used within policy debates, the impact of background questionnaire quality on achievement results, and achievement estimation in heterogeneous populations. I have collaborated with or consulted for national and international organizations including the US State Department, USAID, UNESCO, the IEA and the OECD. I have worked on and lead evaluations and projects in over 30 countries to include Afghanistan, South Sudan, Trinidad and Tobago and the US. I am currently the editor of the IEA policy brief series, the journal Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, serve on the IEA publication editorial committee (PEC) and am a board member of several academic journals.

Most of my research time is focused on two research projects. The first titled Embracing Heterogeneity attempts to develop, integrate, and further refine several statistical methods and assessment designs intended to improve cross-cultural comparability and the local usefulness of scale score estimates, including achievement and correlates, such as motivation, socioeconomic status, and well-being.

The second project focuses on assessment literacy for educators. Through professional development workshops, this project aims to improve how Indiana educators understand, evaluate, and interpret standardized tests and their results. Specifically, the project assists educators with the necessary tools to address questions posed by students and parents around standardized testing. Second, the project empowers educators with the knowledge needed to advocate for fair testing for their students.

I teach courses in evaluation, mixed methods, statistics and large scale assessment.