President's Message
Andrew Ho
2024-2025 NCME President
NCME Presidential Themes for 2024-2025: Continuity, Unity, and Service
Edited remarks presented at the 2024 Presidential Address, April 13, 2024
Annual Meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education
Colleagues, as is tradition, in my role as Vice President and President Elect, I have 5 minutes to briefly preview themes that I hope to elevate as President. My first theme is continuity. My second is unity. My third is service.
First, since my initial term on the NCME board in 2017, I have watched the board work to build continuity. Here, I have picked one of many accomplishments from each of the past 8 presidents that I believe has stood the test of time through intentional investment by subsequent boards and presidents.
- Mark Wilson elevated Classroom Assessment (The NCME board will meet and attend the NCME Special Conference on Classroom Assessment this September).
- Randy Bennett broadened our international reach (e.g., CEJEME, our Chinese English Journal of Educational Measurement and Evaluation).
- Rebecca Zwick centered Fairness (a central focus of the 5th edition of Educational Measurement and the forthcoming revision of the Joint Standards).
- Steve Sireci launched SIGIMIEs (thriving in webinars and in our annual meeting program).
- Ye Tong built our webinar presence through COVID (including a series on diversity, equity, and inclusion).
- Derek Briggs grew consensus on foundations of measurement, including the Task Force I chaired on Foundational Competencies in Educational Measurement (Ackerman et al., 2023).
- Deborah Harris responded to the release of ChatGPT by convening a memorable annual meeting session, (which she revisited in a coordinated session at this conference).
- Michael Walker is fielding a robust response to his forthcoming Presidential Task Force on Educational Measurement and Civil Rights.
If an NCME member from 2017 suddenly time traveled to 2024, how delighted would they be with the ways that we engage our members and society? We have a new conference, a new journal, SIGIMIEs, fairness debates, biweekly webinars, ChatGPT, and Foundational Competencies. As president, I genuinely feel that it would be enough for me to simply continue advancing these signature contributions. Over the next few months, I commit to continuity. I will hit the ground running, not by changing the direction of the race, but by taking worthy batons from presidents past and advancing them. Under the steady hand of our Executive Director Rich Patz, our growth on all these fronts will be intentional, invested, and I hope in the spirit of continuity, enduring.
Second, unity. We are the National Council on Measurement in Education, and I can tell you from my position on the board that the state of our organization is strong. It is strong in spite of turmoil in education and educational measurement, not to mention turmoil in national and international politics, technology, climate, and health. Some of this turmoil is cyclical, but some of it is cynical. Malicious actors are sock-puppeting extreme views, to manufacture disinformation and division.
What is the role of a strong organization in a period of turmoil and disinformation? In a word, unity. To read from our mission, and I quote, “…NCME is a community of measurement scientists and practitioners…” A community, and here I emphasize the word unity in community.
Now we should not confuse unity with uniformity. We certainly need not and do not hold the same views. By unity I mean a condition of harmony and accord, not oneness. Building unity means that we must embrace civil disagreements to build consensus and understand those disagreements. I commit to building unity, both within this organization and among other organizations and entities that intersect with our mission. I will be reaching out to doctoral measurement programs, national and international organizations, and other entities in this spirit of unity, to build consensus about our foundational competencies, and to cohere an alliance of organizations aligned with our mission. I will be attending NCSA, ITC, and IMPS, and of course our own NCME Classroom Assessment Conference, among other gatherings, to build this community.
I have mentioned 1) continuity and 2) unity. My third theme is service. As I’ve said, the state of our organization is strong. And I believe it is only growing stronger. Thanks to the leadership of co-editors Linda Cook and Mary Pitoniak and dozens of NCME authors and reviewers, the 5th edition of Educational Measurement will be published over the next year. Thanks to Kristen Huff and the Standards Management Committee with AERA and APA, the revision of the Joint Standards is underway. This year’s program is full of advances in psychometric modeling, innovative applications, and new conceptual frameworks. For a strong organization with so much existing knowledge and thriving scholarship, I think about the last three words of our NCME mission, “to advance theory and applications of educational measurement to benefit society.” How can we best use what we know and what we learn to benefit society?
In a word, my answer is service. Service comes in many forms, paid and unpaid, in scholarship and in professional practice. Many of you serve in formal and informal roles in NCME. You are reviewers or editors for journals. You sit on Technical Advisory Committees, deliver expert testimony, speak in webinars. You may even spread the gospel of good measurement practice to your networks and the public on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. You serve graduate students and interns, or you are graduate students who mentor junior graduate students. Organizationally, NCME represented good service when past boards made the decision to make the Joint Standards free, the fifth edition of Educational Measurement free, and the forthcoming revision of the Joint Standards free, as well.
How can NCME best serve? How can we benefit society? How can NCME help to amplify your service? To help you best benefit society? These are the questions I will explore with the board over the first few months of my presidency.
This is a great organization in a position of strength. I look forward to advancing it with you, towards continuity, towards unity, and in service.