Providing Comprehensive Analyses and Innovative Research

Pearson employs a large staff of 28 psychometricians, statistical analysts, and research analysts who design and conduct the psychometric and technical analyses for all our custom and augmented measurement products. As members of our Psychometric and Research Services (PRS) group within Custom Assessment Programs (CAP), these individuals ensure that all assessment instruments meet the highest level of professional standards for educational and psychological measurement and that the assessments we develop and publish provide valid and reliable scores.

In recent years, Pearson has become a full service psychometric organization. Traditionally, Pearson has routinely applied the Rasch IRT model to score our tests, but today we have enhanced our scoring methodologies to include 3 PL IRT models with or without pattern scoring. Our team is well versed in utilizing a wide variety of analysis packages (e.g., Parscale, Multilog, Winsteps, Conquest, SAS, SPSS) and programming languages (e.g., Visual Basic, C++, COBOL, S-Plus, and Java). Additionally, the psychometric team was built to cover a wide range of skill sets. The team has experts in IRT modeling (e.g., Rasch, 3PL, Partial Credit, and Graded Response), computer based testing and computerized adaptive testing, standard setting, differential item functioning, structural equating modeling, bootstrapping, hierarchical linear modeling, and in developing test designs. In addition, given our work with large scale custom and customized testing programs, we have also developed our staff to include experts in accountability systems and federal legislation requirements, language proficiency testing, test accommodations, and special needs subpopulations. The depth and breadth of our psychometric expertise ensures our clients a continuity of assessment information and support for policy and accountability decisions.