2017 Psychometrics Seminar and CIIE Conference

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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.

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Nathan Thompson, PhD

Nathan Thompson earned his PhD in Psychometrics from the University of Minnesota, with a focus on computerized adaptive testing. His undergraduate degree was from Luther College with a triple major of Mathematics, Psychology, and Latin. He is primarily interested in the use of AI and software automation to augment and replace the work done by psychometricians, which has provided extensive experience in software design and programming. Dr. Thompson has published over 100 journal articles and conference presentations, but his favorite remains https://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=16&n=1.