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Monday, 7 May 2012


The Faculty of Education continues to be home to one of the world’s leading research centres in the field of social measurement, with research funded by ARC Linkage and Discovery Grants, funding for the Pearson Psychometric Laboratory, high quality research students, and the stream of international visitors including doctoral students from other countries.

The Fifth International Conference on Probabilistic Rasch Models for Measurement in Education, Psychology, Health, Marketing and Social Science, with over 80 delegates from countries covering all continents, took place at UWA between 23 and 25 January, 2012. The conference was preceded by two weeks of Rasch measurement courses in the Graduate School of Education.

Rasch measurement takes its name from the late Danish Mathematician and Statistician Georg Rasch who pioneered an approach to social measurement that has the theoretical characteristics of measurement in the physical sciences. His work had its origins at the Danish Institute for Educational Research and a newspaper article in May 1957 in Denmark had the following remarks about this work.

Something about Bridge Building Techniques: a sensational new creation by Dr Rasch The headline of this article may give readers in this island kingdom associations to comfortable and queue-free transportation between the islands. However, it refers, of course, to the most sensational news at the report to the council at the Danish Institute for Educational Research, news which has already been much spoken of in the press. As a last treat, G. Rasch’s account of his interesting new creation for statistical processing of psychological tests concluded the meeting. Plainly put, this new tool means that one can compare the result of one test directly with the result of a previous test, thereby building a bridge between tests meant for different grades. Whereas these tests were previously something isolated which could not be incorporated into a whole, the opposite is now the case, and one can thus produce a development curve.

The article concluded with the following prediction:

With this illustration, Dr Rasch has at any rate removed the entirely abstract from the concept of bridge building techniques. This ground-breaking work will be studied and employed, not only in Denmark, but in the whole world.

The prediction of the newspaper article has proven to be correct. The work has lead to studies ranging from the development of statistical techniques and software, applications to large scale national and international assessment programs which include the OECD program Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Australian National Assessment Programme in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), through to philosophical and epistemological treatises on the nature of measurement. The Faculty of Education is proud of its links to the seminal work of Georg Rasch through the theoretical and practical applications developed by Winthrop Professor David Andrich and his team in the Pearson Psychometric Laboratory .

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