Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor of Educational Statistics and Research Methods at the University of Delaware working in educational measurement, psychometrics, and quantitative methods. My methodological research focuses on the role of measurement in the analysis of growth and change, with particular emphasis on the ways in which psychometric decisions, which are often somewhat siloed, shape the answers to substantive research questions. For example, recent questions have included:

• How do the choices made by psychometricians about how to link a vertical scale change our understanding of student growth?
• How can we understand a treatment effect when the outcome measure is non-invariant across treatment and control?
• How can we know if it even makes sense to treat scores generated by a psychometric model as continuous, interval-scaled measures?

Alongside my methodological research, I contribute to substantive research in diverse areas including educational assessment, early literacy, child language development, cognitive decline in older adults, student motivation, and more. The My Work page contains links to research products: publications, preprints, and professional reports.

In the classroom, I teach courses in educational and psychological measurement, item response theory, and structural equation modeling, while I contribute to the field via service to the National Council on Measurement in Education and technical advisory roles in U.S. state assessment. My CV, linked here, provides a full overview of my professional life.

I am always happy to discuss my work - please feel free to get in touch via the email listed below.

PS - call me Sandy!