In Memoriam: Jim Popham

William James Popham was born on July 31, 1930, in Portland, Oregon. He grew up in Portland and attended the University of Portland, where he graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and later received his master’s degree in education. After receiving his doctorate from Indiana University in 1958, Popham accepted an assistant professorship at Kansas State College in Pittsburg, Kansas. After two years, he moved to San Francisco State College, where he taught for two years before being appointed as an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Most of his career unfolded at UCLA, where for nearly 30 years, he taught instructional methods to aspiring teachers and courses on evaluation and measurement to graduate students, about 1000 students per year. His impact was internationally recognized—he received several distinguished teaching awards and was honored in January 2000 by UCLA Today as one of the university’s top 20 professors of the twentieth century. He opted for early retirement in 1992 when he discovered that emeritus professors received free parking. In 2009, Jim was appointed to the Congressionally established National Assessment Governing Board, where he served until 2019. From 2010 to 2024, he served on the Technical Advisory Committee for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. 

While Jim was known by many nouns and adjectives by many different people, one word that can be agreed on is prolific. His written contributions included more than 170 papers, 290 journal articles, 35 chapters in books, and over 90 books, many of which have been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Some, Popham said, when deemed appropriate, were even translated into Canadian.

If one has read much of Dr. Popham’s work, his use of alliteration may have caught your eye. It was one way he liked to play with his vocabulary, even in the deployment of fictitious names in his written examples. His leadership extended beyond UCLA into regional and national organizations that promoted educational evaluation. He served on the editorial boards of several major research and evaluation journals, including Educational Research Quarterly, Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, and Evaluation and the Health Professions. In 1978, he was elected president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He was also the founding editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a quarterly journal published by AERA. His commitment to AERA was nothing short of remarkable—after attending his first annual meeting in 1958, he continued to attend for 60 consecutive years.

While teaching at UCLA, he founded and directed the Instructional Objectives Exchange (IOX), a clearinghouse designed to support educators in developing and sharing behavioral objectives. This research and development organization created statewide student achievement tests for a dozen states. While initially a key figure in the programmed instruction movement, a method that emphasized carefully structured learning sequences with clear expectations, his thinking shifted as educators sought better ways to determine when students were ready to progress. This evolution played a pivotal role in what became the criterion-referenced measurement movement. As educational evaluation evolved in the late 1960s and early 1970s, criterion-referenced measurement gained traction because it offered a clearer picture of student progress in relation to defined learning goals rather than comparing students to one another. Popham was at the forefront of this transformation. In his 1969 article Implications of Criterion Referenced Measurement in the Journal of Educational Measurement, he argued that criterion referenced assessments provided more meaningful insights for instruction and decision-making. His 1978 book, Criterion-Referenced Measurement, reinforced this, emphasizing that these assessments offer a direct and useful interpretation of student performance. This movement laid the groundwork for curriculum-based assessment and measurement, which gained momentum in the 1990s. Without Popham’s pioneering work in the 1960s and 1970s, this shift in educational evaluation might not have occurred.

With the publication of Transformative Assessment in 2008, Popham’s work in the formative assessment arena really became known to the masses. In his witty, digestible style, Dr. Popham conveyed valuable teaching strategies that he and his contemporaries had been researching and working with for years. His last work was the 10th edition of a classroom textbook f. or educators, first released in 1995, Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know (2025). With this book, Popham made educational measurement approachable for classroom teachers, ensuring that assessment remained a tool for learning rather than a barrier.

Jim was always clear about his purpose: “Students are my main reason for staying active in the field of evaluation and measurement.” Through teaching, research, writing, and leadership, Jim Popham shaped the field of educational assessment. His wit, wisdom and unwavering commitment to improving education left a lasting impact on generations of educators and students, along with his family and friends.

Gerunda Hughes interviewed Jim for the NCME Archives and History Committee oral history initiative in November 2024. See that interview here.