Patrick Kyllonen from Educational Testing Service will deliver the 10th annual Buros Testing Center/ETS lecture at 2:15 p.m. Sept. 12 in Teachers College Hall, Room 112.
The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a reception in the Buros Library, Teachers College Hall, Room 23.
The annual lecture series brings a distinguished research scientist from Educational Testing Service to UNL to speak on current assessment and testing issues. This year, Kyllonen will give a presentation titled “Advances and Challenges in Assessing Social, Emotional, and Self-Management Skills.”
School develops more than mathematics and English language arts skills. Social-emotional and self-management skills, or character skills, are also important. Kyllonen will make the case for measuring character skills, then review limitations to current rating-scale assessment, particularly reference group effects, response style bias, and limitations in comparability across nations, schools, and demographic subgroups. Kyllonen will suggest a variety of solutions including forced-choice measurement, anchoring vignettes, situational judgment testing, and performance tasks, and further discuss measurement models for these assessments. He will conclude with a discussion of prospects and priorities for moving the science of character assessment forward.
Kyllonen is senior research director of the Center for Academic and Workforce Readiness and Success at Educational Testing Service. His work focuses on non-cognitive assessment in K-12 and higher education, workforce readiness assessment, and international large-scale assessment. He is the author of several books and National Academy of Sciences reports on these topics, is a fellow of APA and AERA, and was instrumental in the development of the Trait-Self Description Personality Inventory.
