Advancing Human Assessment: A Synthesis Over Seven Decades

Abstract

This book has documented the history of ETS's contributions to educational research and policy analysis, psychology, and psychometrics. We close the volume with a brief synthesis in which we try to make more general meaning from the diverse directions that characterized almost 70 years of work.Synthesizing the breadth and depth of the topics covered over that time period is not simple. One way to view the work is across time. Many of the book's chapters presented chronologies, allowing the reader to follow the path of a research stream over the years. Less evident from these separate chronologies was the extent to which multiple streams of work not only coexisted but sometimes interacted.From its inception, ETS was rooted in Henry Chauncey's vision of describing individuals through broad assessment of their capabilities, helping them to grow and society to benefit (Elliot 2014). Chauncey's conception of broad assessment of capability required a diverse research agenda.Following that vision, his research managers assembled an enormous range of staff expertise. Only through the assemblage of such expertise could one bring diverse perspectives and frameworks from many fields to a problem, leading to novel solutions.In the following sections, we summarize some of the key research streams evident in different time periods, where each period corresponds to roughly a decade. Whereas the segmentation of these time periods is arbitrary, it does give a general This work was conducted while M. von Davier was employed with Educational Testing Service.