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 modeling and its outputs shape the answers to substantive research questions. Some examples of issues I have been working on recently include:
- Why population-level grade-to-grade growth estimates in core academic subjects - “years of learning” - vary so much across scales, and what that means for benchmarking effect sizes in practical terms.
- How causal effects in randomized controlled trials show up as overall effects on a latent variable vs. on specific items.
- How standard assumptions in policy and intervention analysis, like heterogeneous treatment effects, affect psychometric modeling when the outcome is a latent variable.
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. My work has been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, Urban Institute Student Upward Mobility Initiative, and National Institutes of Health (we just heard about this one - no link yet!). 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!