To celebrate our alumni excellence across the arts, health, and education, the School of Education has selected four notable UW–Madison alumni to receive a Distinguished Alumni Award.
Deborah Harris is being honored as the Distinguished Alumna in Educational Psychology. She will be delivering a Distinguished Alumni Award presentation on Thursday, Sept. 12, titled, “Ed Psych Girls are Great.” This will take place at 1:45 p.m. in the Education Building’s Wisconsin Idea Room (room 159).
Harris is a distinguished figure in the field of educational measurement, including spending more than three decades at ACT, a nonprofit organization that administers the college entrance exam by the same name. Harris is credited with playing a vital role in shaping the assessment landscape, including the implementation of the ACT on a computer.
Harris spent the past seven years at the University of Iowa’s College of Education, where she taught in the Educational Measurement and Statistics program. Harris earned her PhD in 1983 through the Quantitative Methods program in the UW–Madison School of Education’s No. 1-ranked Department of Educational Psychology. (To learn more, check out her bio here.)
Following is a Q&A with Harris:
What big idea or questions drive your work and career?
Harris: Comparable scores — and ensuring the scores we make decisions on are indicators of comparable knowledge/skills/achievement regardless of administration, questions asked, examinee sample, etc.
How have you sought to answer them and what have you learned so far?
Harris: People define comparable scores differently, study it in different contexts, and evaluate using different criteria.
What are you yet to learn?
Harris: What degree of comparability is the lower bound for different decisions that are made on scores. For example, if you test on a computer, and I test on paper with Braille, how do I ensure our scores can be used in a fair way to help decide what math class we each are placed in next year? It’s a big issue from an equity viewpoint — are scores comparable across different cultural backgrounds, or in international testing such as TIMMS and PISA, where items are translated into different languages, and examinees have different educational experiences.
Where are you from and what drew you to UW–Madison and the School of Education?
Harris: Born in Ohio, raised in Michigan, taught in Georgia and Wisconsin. Being in Wisconsin and Mike Subkoviak.
How did you decide to pursue a degree in Educational Psychology?
Harris: I had a research methods/testing course at Central Michigan University, and loved it.
What class had the greatest impact on you, and why?
Harris: The two test theory courses: Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory. They form the theoretical basis for educational measurement
What do you enjoy most about your work?
Harris: Coming up with solutions to issues; seeing the impact/implementation of my work; mentoring others; working with others who are also interested in/passionate about educational measurement.
Read the full article at: https://education.wisc.edu/news/q-a-with-distinguished-alumni-award-winner-deborah-harris/