Confucius pointed out that the first step toward wisdom is calling things by the right name. The term "Differential Item Functioning" (DIF) did not arise fully formed from the miasma of psychometrics, it evolved from a variety of less accurate terms. Among its forebears was "item bias" but that term has a pejorative connotation that does not…

The Mantel-Haenszel (MH) procedure (Mantel and Haenszel) is a popular method for estimating and testing a common two-factor association parameter in a 2 x 2 x K table. Holland and Holland and Thayer described how to use the procedure to detect differential item functioning (DIF) for tests with dichotomously scored items. Wang, Bradlow, Wainer, and…

This article presents an interview with Linda Gottfredson (nee Howarth), who obtained her BA (psychology, Phi Beta Kappa) from UC Berkeley in 1969, served in the Peace Corps in the Malaysian Health Service from 1969 to 1972, and received her PhD (sociology) from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in 1976. She was Research Scientist at JHU's Center for…

Fumiko Samejima is best known for her pioneering work in polytomous response item response theory (IRT), yielding the eponymous model that has been used broadly for more than 30 years. In this interview, Samejima, on the verge of retiring from her faculty position at the University of Tennessee, discusses her life and career. She also describes…

This article presents an interview with Susan E. Embretson. Embretson attended the University of Minnesota where she received her bachelor's degree in 1967 and earned a PhD in 1973 in psychology. She became an assistant professor at the University of Kansas in 1974 and was promoted to associate professor and full professor. In 2004, she accepted a…

Robinson interviews Juliet Popper Shaffer, a scientist, who graduated from Swarthmore College in 1953 and Stanford in 1957 with degrees in psychology and concentrations in math, philosophy, and statistics. In 2004 she received the second Florence Nightingale David award given biannually by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies to a…

In this article, the author interviews writer Dr. Paul Holland. After receiving his B.A. in mathematics in 1962, he attended graduate school at Stanford, receiving his Ph.D. in Statistics in 1966. He served as President of the Psychometric Society in 1989; received the E. F. Lindquist Award in 2000 from AERA and ACT; was designated a National…

William Playfair's pie chart is more than 200 years old and yet its intellectual origins remain obscure. The inspiration likely derived from the logic diagrams of Llull, Bruno, Leibniz, and Euler, which were familiar to William because of the instruction of his mathematician brother John. The pie chart is broadly popular but--despite its common…

Robinson interviews Howard Wainer, a scientist, who graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965 and Princeton in 1968 with degrees in mathematics and psychometrics, respectively. He taught at Temple University and The University of Chicago before moving to the Bureau of Social Science Research during the Carter Administration. Wainer…

The concern behind my question, "Can there be validity without reliability?" (Moss, 1994), was about the influence of measurement practices on the quality of education. I argued that conventional operationalizations of reliability in the measurement literature, which I summarized as "consistency, quantitatively defined, among independent…

Bruce Thompson's edited volume begins with a basic principle, one might call it a basic truth, "reliability is a property that applies to scores, and not immutably across all conceivable uses everywhere of a given measure." (p. 3). The author claims that this principle is little known and-or little understood. While that is an arguable point, the…

Lyle V. Jones served as director of the Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory and also became the Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina (UNC). Jones has been a Research Professor at UNC since 1992. This article presents an interview with Jones wherein he talked about his career as a researcher. Jones also…

In this article, the author comments on an article by Dunn, Kadane, and Garrow, "Comparing Harm Done by Mobility and Class Absence: Missing Students and Missing Data." He believes the research reported in that article should serve as a model for future applications of Bayesian methods in important educational research problems. The author lauds…

Discusses the book review as both science and art, the result of critical evaluation mixed with the expertise and predilections of the reviewer. Notes that there is no accounting for taste, but there is identifying and acknowledging it. (SLD)