Measuring and Assessing Skills: Real-Time Measurement of Cognition, Personality, and Behavior

February 9–10, 2018

This conference brings together a group of leading scholars developing the next generation of measurements of cognition, personality, and behavior. This body of scholarship has multiple goals, all of which will be addressed.

Any effective system of personalized education will need to inventory the broad array of skills that have been found to be predictive of achievement in school and in life. Traditional paper and pencil tests are quite cumbersome and not tailored to capturing specific skills. Self-reports of personality and behavior are unreliable. Teacher evaluations are subjective (although predictively more reliable), time-consuming, and often incomparable across teacher reports. Administrative data have predictive power (see e.g. Jackson, 2018 and Kautz et al., 2016) but remain to be aligned with traditional measurements.

Resources

Download Background Papers


Organizers

  • James J. Heckman, The University of Chicago & CEHD
  • Otus

Program

February 9

Welcoming Remarks
James J. Heckman, The University of Chicago

Developments in Performance Assessments: Concepts, Methods, and Examples
Robert Mislevy, Educational Testing Service

Developments in Performance Assessments: Concepts, Methods, and Examples
Michelle LaMar, Educational Testing Service

Developments in Performance Assessments: Concepts, Methods, and Examples
Patrick Kyllonen, Educational Testing Service

Affective Computing in the Classroom: Theory, Methods, and Technology
Oliver Wilder, MIT
Discussant: Patrick Kyllonen, Educational Testing Service

Assessing Psychological Traits via Digital Footprints
Sandra Matz, Columbia Business School
Discussant: Michelle Zhou, Juji, Inc.

Getting Virtually Personal: Using Cognitive Virtual Agents to Infer Individuals’ Personality for Person-Centered Decision Making
Michelle Zhou, Juji, Inc.

Review
Tim Kautz, Mathematica Policy Research
Brent Roberts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Open Discussion

February 10

Game-Based Measurement in Early Learning and the Implications for Personalized and Adaptive Experiences at PBS KIDS
Gregory Chung, CRESST
Charles Parks, CRESST
Jeremy Roberts, PBS KIDS Digital
Discussant: Michelle LaMar, Educational Testing Service

A Sociogenomic Perspective on Continuous Personality Assessment
Brent Roberts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Discussant: Tim Kautz, Mathematica Policy Research

Modeling Survey Response
Armin Falk, University of Bonn

Experimental Elicitation of Preferences and Skills in Human Development Context
Fabian Kosse, University of Bonn
Discussant: Thomas Neuber, University of Bonn

Otus
Keith Westman, Otus

Closing Discussion and Remarks