NCME Endowment Matching Challenge | September: Andrew Ho

Each month through the new year, an NCME Past President is matching member donations to the NCME Endowment, dollar for dollar, up to $500. The NCME Endowment is a permanent fund supporting measurement excellence and integrity for generations to come. Each participating Past President was asked to reflect briefly on one question: “What from your presidency do you hope will endure in perpetuity?” This month’s past president addresses this prompt below. To donate, click here. 

Submitted by Andrew Ho, NCME Past President

I am proud to kick off this fundraising drive for the NCME Endowment, which past presidents launched together at the end of my presidential term and the board approved last year. To me, this endowment represents an opportunity to invest in my “professional home” in a manner designed to endure. I am donating because I want to ensure measurement excellence thrives in perpetuity. I hope you will donate, and I hope that I can have the honor of matching your gift.

If the prompt is, “what from my presidency do I hope will endure,” one answer is easy: “this endowment.” But I will answer a question that invites more historical distance: What from NCME in 1999 do I hope will endure? My answer: the search for validity evidence for high stakes testing, or more succinctly: the search for test consequences. 

I picked 1999 because that was the year I graduated from college and hoped to receive a Fulbright grant to study in Japan, where I had studied the year before. As I noted in my presidential address, observing students and teachers responding to the pressure of college entrance exams at an Osaka high school, I realized the power of testing. I hoped to return to answer a question I had written in my Fulbright application: “To what extent is Japanese ‘education’ a function of the ‘examination’?”

Unbeknownst to me then, my future advisor Ed Haertel was that year delivering his NCME presidential address in Montreal. He titled it, “Validity arguments for high-stakes testing: In search of the evidence.” Ed distinguished among three purposes of large-scale testing: 1) providing information, 2) focusing public attention, and 3) influencing educational practice. He remarked on the lack of evidentiary reasoning, let alone evidence, that supported our use of tests for these purposes. Ed and I would meet for the first time in November that year. The questions he posed to the NCME community would become the questions I would learn to ask, sharpened by his mentorship, by the training ahead of me, and by the support of that same NCME community.

Many of us are drawn to educational measurement because of causal premises: We can improve student outcomes by improving tested content, adopting new test-based policies, or adopting improved psychometric methods. In 1999, with NCLB set to crest over the millennial horizon, our measures were about to become more widespread than ever. The questions Ed was raising, about evidence, consequences, and what tests actually do to students, schools, and society, had never been more urgent.

I believe NCME remains the best community to ask and answer these questions. Our members bring not only classical and modern measurement methods but, increasingly, a full toolkit of causal inference methods to study test use and consequences. We could do even more and better than we are doing now. Donating to this endowment is, for me, a gesture of faith and a commitment that we will.

Please donate to the NCME Endowment, this Fund for Measurement Excellence and Integrity, and help this community keep asking these questions, and answering them well, for generations to come.