UW–Madison’s Kylie Gorney was selected to receive the Harold Gulliksen Psychometric Research Fellowship from Educational Testing Service (ETS). The fellowship is the most prestigious student award issued by ETS, and is intended to honor Harold Gulliksen, one of the pioneers of psychometrics, who was a professor of psychology at Princeton University and the inaugural director of the ETS fellowship program.
The fellowship recognizes graduate students in psychometrics who are working on their dissertations, and are conducting innovative, applied research of the highest quality.
Gorney is a fourth-year PhD student with the School of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology in the Quantitative Methods program. Her research focuses on describing, exploring, preventing, and detecting multiple types of test aberrance, as commonly occurs in situations related to test security, speediness, or low motivation. Gorney’s work draws predominantly on process data (e.g., response time) and novel item formats that are ideally suited for computer-based testing applications, and the methods she is developing apply broadly for most types of assessments.
Gorney will conduct her research project during the 2022-23 year, beginning with participating in the ETS Research and Measurement Sciences Internship Program this summer. Her work will be done under the supervision of her academic advisor, UW–Madison Professor James Wollack, and two ETS mentors, including ETS distinguished presidential appointee Sandip Sinharay and Carol Eckerly, a psychometrician and alumna of UW–Madison’s Department of Educational Psychology.