One of the best aspects of my position is the opportunity to travel the world and talk with many experts about psychometrics and educational assessment. In December 2017, I was lucky enough to travel to Monterrey, Mexico, with the dual purpose of a conference and a Psychometrics Seminar. It was an exciting week that taught me a lot about education in Latin America.
The first half of the week was the Congreso Internacional de Innovacion Educativa, the premier conference in educational technology in Latin America, with more than 3,000 attendees. I had the opportunity to present on a project we are doing with Tecnologico de Monterrey to implement adaptive testing in admissions exams. Tecnologico is the #2 university in Mexico, and therefore a leader in all of Latin America, as well as being the host of the conference. In addition, I heard of number of interesting talks, including one by the CEO of Coursera on the role of MOOCs in higher education. I’m personally a MOOC addict, though I tend to start new courses far faster than I ever finish one.
The second half of the week was the 2017 ASC Learning Summit, a 2-day seminar to teach item response theory and adaptive testing to anyone that wanted to learn. We had 22 attendees, which was extremely successful given the short notice. (Tec had to move the entire conference from Mexico City to Monterrey after an earthquake) We had 18 from Mexico, two from the US, one from Barbados, and one from the UK. These included university professors, K12 assessment professionals, higher education admissions staff, certification test psychometricians, and more.
Nathan Thompson, PhD, is CEO and Co-Founder of Assessment Systems Corporation (ASC). He is a psychometrician, software developer, author, and researcher, and evangelist for AI and automation. His mission is to elevate the profession of psychometrics by using software to automate psychometric work like item review, job analysis, and Angoff studies, so we can focus on more innovative work. His core goal is to improve assessment throughout the world.
Nate was originally trained as a psychometrician, with an honors degree at Luther College with a triple major of Math/Psych/Latin, and then a PhD in Psychometrics at the University of Minnesota. He then worked multiple roles in the testing industry, including item writer, test development manager, essay test marker, consulting psychometrician, software developer, project manager, and business leader. He is also cofounder and Membership Director at the International Association for Computerized Adaptive Testing (iacat.org). He’s published 100+ papers and presentations, but his favorite remains https://scholarworks.umass.edu/pare/vol16/iss1/1/.
