André A. Rupp

A few words about my primary research areas of interest….

My synthesis-oriented work frequently circumscribes, deconstructs, and re-arranges the current state-of-the-art of methodological research and practice at the intersection of educational and psychological measurement, applied cognitive psychology, and the learning sciences. In alignment with this work, in 2016 I published a co-edited Handbook of Cognition and Assessment with my Canadian colleague Jacqueline P. Leighton, whose work I have respected for many years.

Related to this, past research interests centered around cognitively-grounded assessment approaches and associated statistical models, which broadly fall under the umbrella terms diagnostic measurement and diagnostic classification models (DCMs). In 2010, I co-authored a book on this topic with two colleagues of mine in the field, Jonathan Templin and Robert Henson, which has received rather positive reviews from colleagues and practitioners and won an Outstanding Contribution to Educational Research Methodology award from AERA Division D.

In recent years I have become interested how quantitative methodologies are used in cognitively-grounded validation approaches for next generation assessments. This has brought me in touch with the fields of automated scoring and virtual performance assessments, which I am looking forward to helping shape in some way in the next years. Finally, I am currently the editor of the ITEMS educational module series of NCME (2016-2019), which is an exciting opportunity to help bring this outlet into a richer digital presence.

A few words about my career path…

In what feels almost like another lifetime at this point, I initially studied to become a secondary school teacher for English, French, and Mathematics at the University of Hamburg in my hometown of Hamburg, Germany. Through completing my Master’s work in Teaching English as a Second Language / Applied Linguistics and Mathematics / Statistics in the U.S. as well as my Ph.D. work in Measurement, Evaluation, and Research Methodology in Canada, I got lured more deeply into academic research and graduate-level teaching.

I started my academic career at the bilingual University of Ottawa in Canada followed by a two-year visiting professorship at the Institute for Educational Progress in Berlin, Germany, where I worked in an interdisciplinary team on developing national standards-based assessments for English as a first foreign language. I then moved to the Washington, DC area where I worked for five years as an assistant and associate professor with tenure in the EDMS department at the University of Maryland. I left this position for a research director opportunity at ETS in Princeton, NJ near New York City where I have been living with my wife since 2013.