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Improving Educational Outcomes with Online Testing Innovations
Larry Albright faced a professional crossroads in 1999. With a PhD in computer science, Albright had been teaching computer science at the university level for 15 years, but he had gotten to the point where he wanted to put his significant skills and knowledge into creative practice. Nearly all of the software engineering jobs he’d checked out seemed to involve working on weapons systems for military contractors, which didn’t interest him at all.
One Sunday, he opened up The Washington Post’s Jobs section and an ad leapt out at him, as the job it described would benefit not only from his extensive technical expertise but also from his many years in the classroom, and he made a decision he has never regretted. He joined the staff of the American Institutes for Research (AIR), where he now spends his days improving the way educational assessments are delivered, reported and used to help each child learn.
Educational testing and reporting is just one aspect of AIR ’s work, and it is an area in which they have quickly become a recognized leader and innovator. Additional areas of expertise include education research and evaluation; international education and development; individual and organizational performance; health research and communications; usability design and testing; employment equity; and statistical and research methods. Originally founded in 1946 by John Flanagan to develop aptitude tests for WWII combat pilots, AIR is now based right across from the Georgetown waterfront and employs some 1,500 employees worldwide.
The Computer Science and Statistical Center, for which Albright is now chief software engineer, supports AIR ’s Assessment Program, whose stated mission is to help students learn, teachers teach and parents know what is happening at school, according to Selina Tolosa, who heads the 70-member team. “We provide a full range of testing services, including test development, online and paper-based services, and scoring and reporting,” she explained. “We use artificial intelligence to score questions and overall tests automatically, and we do it using a Webbased system,” she continued. This offers a significant cost and logistical advantage, since it does not require any hardware in the schools except for the computers on which the students test.
It’s not surprising that AIR has quickly become the recognized leader in online educational assessment. Some of the innovations Albright and his colleagues have developed relate to security; others have advanced the sophistication of computer-adaptive student testing. Their innovative, interactive item types can hone in on a student’s true level of knowledge as they keep him or her interested, and the test is able to adjust to the student as he or she takes it, which further confirms skill levels. Other breakthroughs involve the incredibly detailed reporting that is delivered to the teacher and the parent, complete with a recommended course of action to round out that child’s knowledge. Thanks to the system designed and built by Albright and his team at AIR , all of this information is reported back instantaneously, with more than 24 million transactions occurring during a school day, which translates to more than 800 transactions per second.
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