Staff

Neal Kingston, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Research in Education and Coordinator for the Research, Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics Program and Director of the Center for Educational Research and Evaluation at the University of Kansas. The Center serves the Kansas Department of Education by developing, administering, and analyzing K-12 assessments and reporting instructionally oriented resulted.

Dr. Kingston’s research focuses on enhancing the validity and utility of large-scale assessments to better facilitate student learning. To this end his primary research interests include:

• Use of computers to enhance test validity including the development of new item types and implementation of principles of universal design;
• Development and implementation of improved psychometric/cognitive models to provide more informative sub-scores and better diagnostic information;
• Improved scoring systems to maximize the validity and reliability of constructed response items both using human graders and computer-based grading; and
• Improved score reporting systems to help educators make test results more readily actionable.

Dr. Kingston also serves as a consultant to several testing organizations.

Dr. Kingston started his career as a high school science teacher. He worked at Educational Testing Service as an applied psychometrician, measurement group manager, Director of Research and Test Development for the GRE Program, and Executive Director for Workplace Assessment and Training. As the former Kentucky Associate Commissioner for Curriculum and Assessment, Dr. Kingston was responsible for a statewide assessment system that included performance events and mathematics and writing portfolios. He worked on more than a dozen state assessment programs as vice president then senior vice president at Measured Progress. Prior to coming to the university of Kansas Dr. Kingston was Vice President of Research at CTB McGraw-Hill in which capacity he shared responsibility for ensuring that assessment products met educator needs.

Laura Kramer, Ph.D., leads all operational activities for the Kansas Assessment System. Prior to coming to CETE in July 2010, she served as the Senior Psychometrician in two state education agencies.

Laura earned her Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From that technical and theoretical background, Laura embarked on a professional career as an applied psychometrician and over 16 years has observed that putting an actual test item in front of actual 12-year-olds can provide some very surprising data that don’t necessarily conform to psychometric theory. Understanding the educational and technical implications of unexpected results like this is what Laura finds most fun and challenging about her work.

Laura has broad experience in all aspects of criterion-referenced test development, from aiding in developing a testable curriculum framework, test specifications, and test blueprints; through item development, data analysis using both classical and IRT methods, and form assembly; to scaling, standard-setting, and reporting. As a peer reviewer for the U.S. Department of Education, Laura is also familiar with federal education policy and uses her technical expertise to help other states ensure that their assessment systems are comprehensive, rigorous, and of high technical quality to provide valid and reliable results for use in state and federal accountability models. She also has extensive experience working with local school districts, schools, and teachers to help those stakeholders understand assessment systems and how to best utilize their state’s assessment data to improve student education. Which is the whole point, after all...

For fun, Laura writes technical manuals and reviews technical documentation.

Angela is a former secondary mathematics teacher with expertise in mathematics curriculum and instruction. At CETE, she coordinates the development and implementation of mathematics test items for formative, interim, and summative assessments. She works with officials at the Kansas State Department of Education on efforts to assist educators in implementing the interim assessment and to conduct content reviews of mathematics items being development for future assessments. Her research interests include models of conceptual understanding as well as measurement of conceptual understanding, particularly concerning essential mathematics concepts.

Hyun-jeong Cho is a post doctoral research associate whose current interests include research, and evaluation on alternate and modified Assessment and the impact of self determination on student achievement.

Patrick is a Psychometrician II with CETE. His primary responsibilities include the development and coordination in support of the Kansas assessment program, serving as the general assessment project manager for the reading, mathematics, science, social studies, and writing assessments.

Nora’s duties include answering phone and email questions regarding state assessment issues and CETE website usage. Nora also orders supplies, processes payments for goods and services necessary for the successful completion of CETE’s research goals and initiatives; identifies and submits work orders for facility repairs and maintenance, posts online advertisements for open positions, and performs other miscellaneous duties as they arise.

As the technical editor for CETE, Lisa provides both copyediting and comprehensive editing for a variety of documents including assessments, manuals, research articles, website content, and correspondence. Additionally, she has edited materials for the BAIP (Blending Assessment with Instruction Program). Lisa also handles copyright permissions for the Kansas Assessments.

Robert's primary responsibility is development and implementation of the new Interim Assessment program. In addition, Rob serves as a resource on all psychometric aspects to the other center staff and as a mentor to graduate students.

Vicki is a Research Associate in at CETE and an Assistant Professor in the Psychology and Research in Education Department. She specializes in applied statistics and measurement, confirmatory factor analysis and educational and psychological item analyses. Her primary duties with CETE are working with the Kansas English Language Proficiency Assessment.

Julie is a former special education teacher with expertise in mild to moderate disabilities. A licensed school psychologist, she has taught in PRE’s School Psychology program for the last ten years. At CETE, she coordinates the development and implementation of the Kansas Alternate Assessment, the Kansas Assessment of Modified Measures, and the use of testing accommodations on these and the general assessments. Research interests include testing and classroom accommodations for diverse student populations, assessment of K-12 classroom behavior, development and measurement of cross-cultural attitudes and skills, and the correspondence between self and observer ratings of high-inference characteristics.

Gail works with staff at the Center to develop and submit proposals for research funding from a variety of external sources.  She also works with the test development team.  

Rebecca maintains the Perl programs that make the CETE website go. She creates data sets for research and deals with the really challenging phone calls from school districts.

Mark is the System Administrator of the CETE production, development, and QA computer systems and networks. He also supports the CETE office workstations and printers.

Mary manages issues dealing with the Test Builder website and is the liaison between the programming/website staff and the KCA/test engine technical staff. She also serves as the resource person for school districts and questions regarding formative testing.

Manages all aspects of CETE's Technology projects including the hiring, management of technology personal and infrastructure (hardware and software). Manages application design, development and maintenance of all enterprise applications used for Kansas Computerized Assessments (KCA). Works with the Director and Measurement Staff to gather requirements for new and existing applications, prepares IT development project plan and production deployment or release plan.

Mahesh maintains and updates KCA, TDE and Test Builder. He also manages the job assignments and duties of the technology GRAs and handles issues concerning the production database and web server.

Nick’s main focus is to facilitate the smooth operation of reporting by maintaining existing applications and developing new applications for use by teachers and state, district, and school administrators. In addition, Nick maintains several of the internal web services used by staff to further our core mission and serves as a backup system administrator when necessary.

Amy manages issues dealing with the Test Builder website and is the liaison between the programming/website staff and the KCA/test engine technical staff. She also serves as the resource person for school districts and answers questions regarding formative testing.

Ronda serves as the office manager and main CETE contact when the Director is unavailable and manages the Director’s calendar and scheduling of appointments. She also processes all payroll documents for CETE staff and is the Personnel Related Staff Member for HR issues.