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Dr. Denis Jarvinen
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President of
Strategic Measurement and Evaluation, Inc.
Dr. Jarvinen is a recognized
authority in the assessment industry with over 20 years of
practical experience managing the design, development, scoring,
and psychometric analysis of large-scale assessment programs.
Across the many projects on which he has worked, he has
developed a deep understanding of the challenges faced by public
and private organizations as they seek to create meaningful
assessment systems. This understanding allows him to identify
assessment solutions that meet the needs of his clients and that
are consistent with professional assessment standards.
Dr. Jarvinen has managed major
educational assessment projects at the district, state, and
national levels. He has worked with administrators and educators
in places such as Baton Rouge, Oakland, and Cleveland to develop
customized assessment programs matched to local needs. At the
state level, he has led content development efforts for state
assessment programs in Illinois, Oregon, Wisconsin, Michigan,
Ohio, and Delaware. Although each project was unique, many of
the activities and responsibilities were similar across each
assignment. For example, in Illinois, Dr. Jarvinen managed the
development of new test content for the state’s mathematics,
science, and social science tests at all tested grades for
almost a decade. His responsibilities included 1) working with
the State Board of Education staff and committees of Illinois
educators to translate the state’s test specifications into
specific item targets 2) recruiting and training item writers to
produce high-quality items aligned to those targets, 3) direct
supervision of the item review process, including bias and
sensitivity reviews, 4) monitoring the test production process
to ensure the item content was presented as intended, 5)
completing the psychometric analyses needed to establish the
quality of the items, and 6) auditing the equating and scaling
process. His knowledge of the assessment development cycle
ensured that the final assessments met the highest standards for
validity, reliability, and fairness. Of particular note,
as part of his work with Illinois, Dr. Jarvinen managed a team
that implemented one of the first open-ended mathematics scoring
rubrics ever employed in a large-scale statewide assessment.
At the national level, Dr. Jarvinen was
the lead psychometrician and program evaluator on a multi-year,
multi-million dollar project funded by the United States
Department of Homeland Security that focused on the redesign of
the naturalization test for United States citizenship. Among
other duties, Dr. Jarvinen had primary responsibility for the
design of sampling plans and the completion of psychometric
analyses associated with a national field test of new
constructed-response items developed to assess the English
language skills of applicants for United States citizenship. Dr.
Jarvinen was responsible for recruiting and working with teams
of national content experts to develop the scoring rubrics
needed for the project. He was also responsible for
effectively communicating the results of the project to
representatives of key stakeholder groups across the country, to
members of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and
Assessment, and to members of Congress.
In the mid 1990s, Dr. Jarvinen led the
development of an educational scoring center devoted to the
hand-scoring of performance assessment items administered in
large-scale assessment programs. This project included the
selection and installation of scanning hardware and software,
establishing procedures for the recruitment and training of the
professional scoring staff, the development of quality assurance
procedures, and the real time analysis of scored data. The
success of the first center led to the development of additional
scoring sites. By the end of the 1990s, Dr. Jarvinen was
managing a series of scoring centers that employed approximately
1,000 scorers and processed over 10 million student responses
during a single scoring cycle.
Since founding Strategic Measurement and
Evaluation, Inc. (SME), Dr. Jarvinen has continued this focus on
the development of meaningful assessments and the valid and
reliable scoring of student responses to constructed-response
items. SME maintains two educational scoring centers (in
Champaign, Illinois and Lafayette, Indiana) and provide services
for a number of large-scale scoring projects that incorporate
both multiple-choice and constructed-response items. During the
2009 spring scoring season, the centers scored approximately 1.4
million performance assessment items and all projects were
completed accurately and on schedule.
Underlying Dr. Jarvinen’s practical
achievements in the areas of assessment development and the
scoring of constructed-response items is a strong foundation in
psychometric theory. Dr. Jarvinen regularly completes
psychometric work that requires the thoughtful application of
techniques associated with both Classical Test Theory and Item
Response Theory. Among other projects, Dr. Jarvinen currently
serves as the contractor’s lead psychometrician for the Michigan
English Language Proficiency Assessment. Dr. Jarvinen is also
experienced in the application of statistical techniques to
detect differential item functioning (DIF) and was one of the
first researchers to apply differential item functioning
analyses to polytomous items in the analysis of rating scale
data.
Dr. Jarvinen holds a Ph.D. and an M.S.in Educational Psychology from Purdue University. He
is a member the American Educational Research Association where
he is a frequent presenter at national conferences.
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