In early January, Madhabi Chatterji, Associate Professor of Measurement, Evaluation & Education, delivered two talks at a colloquium hosted by Spain's National University for Distance Learning (UNED). 

Chatterji's primary lecture was on the use of extended term mixed method (ETMM) designs to evaluate the effectiveness of educational programs. Where most federal policy research in the United States emphasizes randomized field trials, ETMM considers temporal factors in gaining thorough understandings of programs as they take hold in organizations or communities. Chatterji has argued that using multiple research methods is essential in designing sound field experiments that can demonstrate cause-and-effect relationships between programs and outcomes. . 

Her talk was webcast nationally throughout Spain via UNED's affiliated colleges and centers. 

Chatterji also spoke to a smaller faculty group on classroom assessment and the proximal assessment for learner diagnosis (PALD) model. PALD requires teachers to break down problem-solving for any academic task into a set of connected skills and concepts required by students to solve the tasks. Teachers must organize tasks by difficulty and then assess student performance at each step to understand precisely where students make errors or show lack of understanding. The underlying philosophy of PALD is to re-conceive testing in general as a diagnostic process embedded within instruction, rather than simply as an instrument for testing students at the end of a semester or year or for sorting students by merit.

AT TC, Chatterji also serves as Director, Assessment and Evaluation Research Initiative (AERI).

Published Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2015