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Professor Professor David Andrich, who holds the Chapple Chair in the Graduate School of Education, was awarded the Benjamin Drake Wright Senior Scholar Award by the Rasch Measurement Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association, taking home $1000US and a plaque.

The award was established to recognize leaders that have made outstanding and influential contributions to the field of social measurement, and in particular to Rasch measurement theory. This year was the first time the award had been presented. The event took place at the 2016 AERA annual meeting in Washington, DC, USA earlier this year.

Rasch measurement is a field of study named after the Danish Mathematician and Statistician Georg Rasch, who developed a theory of measurement for the social sciences which is based on the same principles as measurement in the physical sciences. Benjamin Wright was a Professor of Education and Psychology at The University of Chicago and was primarily responsible for bringing the attention of the work on Rasch measurement to the English speaking world. On the recommendation of David Andrich, Rasch was invited to The University of Western Australia, and in 1974 spent six months as a visiting professor hosted jointly by the Departments of Education and Mathematics.

David Andrich has made substantial contributions to quantitative social science including seminal work on the Rasch model for measurement for analysing assessments made in ordered categories such as ratings and partial credit. These are ubiquitous in education, psychology, social sciences, health and other areas. The Department of Education at The University of Western Australia has hosted international conferences on Rasch models for measurement, with the next conference to be held in January, 2018. David Andrich, who also is a visiting professor at the Centre for Educational Assessment, The University of Oxford, was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia in 1990 and in 2012 was listed as one of the 100 Most Influential People in WA by the West Australian Newspaper.

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