The Buros Center for Testing in collaboration with Educational Testing Service is hosting the 13th annual Buros/ETS Lecture at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 23 in Jorgensen Hall, Room 249. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a reception in the Buros Library.

The lecture, “Measuring and Using Student Growth,” will be delivered by Dan McCaffrey, principal research scientist with Educational Testing Service. Measuring student growth is of continued interest to state and local educational departments. The interest is fueled in part by policies such as the federal Every Student Succeeds Act which includes it as a component for assessing students and evaluating educators and schools. For more than 60 years, psychometricians have raised concerns about the reliability of growth measures.

McCaffrey will review recent work on the accuracy of K-12 student growth measures discussing the implications for students with different levels of achievement. The lecture will cover questions that growth might be used to answer about the performance of educators and educational systems and what types of growth measures might be best suited for answering those questions.