Deborah Harris is a distinguished figure in the field of educational measurement, including spending more than three decades at ACT, a nonprofit organization that administers the college entrance exam by the same name. Harris is credited with playing a vital role in shaping the assessment landscape, including the implementation of the ACT on a computer.
Harris earned her PhD in 1983 through the Quantitative Methods program in the UW–Madison School of Education’s No. 1-ranked Department of Educational Psychology. She then spent the majority of her career at ACT in multiple leadership positions, including as vice president of psychometric research.
In her distinguished 40-year career, Harris’ scholarship has focused on the areas of test equating, scaling, and context effects for purposes of ensuring that the scores that are reported for assessments are directly comparable and indicate the same level of achievement across different sets of items, administration conditions, and types of tests. Harris had a unique opportunity to embed her research into improving the high-stakes assessments taken annually by over 2 million students worldwide.
Harris spent the past seven years at the University of Iowa’s College of Education, where she taught in the Educational Measurement and Statistics program. Harris’ resume also includes serving in leadership positions with the National Council for Measurement in Education, and as editor-in-chief for Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice.