IOE to Cooperate with Educational Testing Service

IOE is soon to sign a Memorandum of Cooperation with Educational Testing Service, the world’s largest private organization in educational measurement and testing. During their recent visit to ETS Headquarters in Princeton (New Jersey, USA), IOE experts Elena Kardanova and Tatjana Kanonire met with their ETS colleagues to map out the overall scope of the upcoming cooperation and to negotiate preliminary plans in a number of specific academic areas.      

The parties believe this collaboration framework will bring about a host of opportunities for jointly conducting high-caliber research in psychometrics and related domains, while also enabling IOE doctoral students to pursue academic internships with ETS. It is expected that IOE and ETS will primarily center their efforts on such areas as psychometric design, cross-border educational monitoring and benchmarking, evaluating complex constructs, etc.    

Elena Kardanova and Tatjana Kanonire were visiting ETS Office in Princeton upon a special invitation by Kadriye Ercikan, ETS Vice President for Statistical Analysis, Data Analysis, and Psychometric Research. A series of meetings held by the parties involved ETS unit heads and leading experts, including R&D Executive Director Tom Van Essen, Senor Psychometric Director Vanessa Manna, etc.    

IOE’s collaboration with ETS has a history spanning several years by now; however, the scope has been limited to a few specific areas so far. For example, an ETS expert was among the guest faculty for this year’s Summer School on Applied Psychometrics held at IOE. I’m sure embarking on fully-fledged partnership with ETS, which is now to get underway in just a very short while, immediately following a Memorandum of Cooperation is signed, will mark a major leap ahead for both organizations. Our visit to ETS primarily sought to familiarize our colleagues with what IOE has recently focused on in the field of psychometric R&D, in order to find common grounds on which to proceed with joint research endeavors going forward. And I’m pleased to note the main outcomes of our academic presentations and negotiations suggest there are plenty of areas where we can join our expertise to deliver better results.

Elena Kardanova 
Head of the IOE Center for Monitoring the Quality in Education

Aside from a highly promising agenda in joint R&D, the parties have also discussed whether simplified procedures could be administered for IOE’s PhD candidates in psychometrics who apply to ETS’s internship programs.       

“Competition to win an internship slot at ETS has always been tough reflecting the organization’s premier status in the global realm of educational monitoring and testing as well as how highly recognized such a credential is by employers in the field. Over the course of its history, ETS has pioneered a whole range of conceptual approaches and developments in psychometrics, many of which have found wide acceptance across the globe,” Tatjana Kanonire of IOE explains. “As part of the visit, we were negotiating for a simplified admission procedure to be applied to IOE’s best PhD students in psychometrics who aspire to intern at ETS. The criteria may include, among others, successfully qualifying through IOE’s internal competition and a doctoral project in line with the R&D scope at ETS Office in Princeton.”