September 2021

Mark R. Wilson, a longstanding AERA Fellow and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, will give the 2020 AERA E. F. Lindquist Lecture on November 15 from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. ET. The lecture, rescheduled from the Virtual Annual Meeting in April, is titled “Finding the Right Grain Size for Measurement in the Classroom.” Wilson will be introduced by Guillermo Solano-Flores (Stanford University), who will chair the lecture. The lecture will be followed by an open discussion with Q&A from virtual attendees.

“Dr. Wilson’s significant work on key education assessment issues will have broad appeal to the education research community,” said AERA Executive Director Felice Levine. “I encourage researchers from across the field to attend this timely lecture from Dr. Wilson, who is an expert in developing and applying sound approaches for measurement in education.”

Attendees can register for this event here.

In his abstract, Dr. Wilson elaborates on the lecture’s theme:

It is broadly accepted that successful assessment is one of the best ways to improve educational outcomes; and the focus of this improvement is finding “actionable information for improving classroom instruction” (Lehrer, 2021). In this presentation, I will describe a framework for designing assessments that is keyed to the scope of the educational interpretations. [please click here to read full abstract]

Wilson is the 2019 winner of the AERA E. F. Lindquist Award, named in honor of E. F. Lindquist, an outstanding scholar and researcher. This annual award is presented jointly by AERA and ACT in recognition of outstanding applied or theoretical research in the field of testing and measurement. The award is meant to acknowledge a body of research of an empirical, theoretical, or integrative nature rather than a single study.

An article emanating from his lecture will be considered for publication in the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics.

Wilson is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and also at the University of Melbourne. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in 1984. His research and development interest is in measurement across the social sciences, but he focuses on educational applications. He has published 149 refereed articles, 70 invited chapters in edited books, and 14 books. He was elected president of the Psychometric Society, and, more recently, president of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). He is also a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of AERA and the American Psychological Association, and a National Associate of the U.S. National Research Council.

Wilson has a long record of service to AERA and the education research field. He chaired the management committee of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics from 2009 to 2014, served on the AERA Grants Program Governing Board from 2007 to 2010, and participated in the Joint Committee on Guidelines and Standards for Educational Evaluation in 2004.