CU Boulder Education Professor Derek Briggs is one of just 24 exemplary scholars nationwide to be named a 2023 Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the country’s largest interdisciplinary research association devoted to the study of education and learning.
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) “advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.” AERA Fellows are nominated by peers and selected by AERA Fellows based on their notable and sustained research achievements.
Briggs is a professor in the School of Education’s Research and Evaluation Methodology program, where he is also the director of the Center for Assessment Design Research and Evaluation. His research focuses upon advancing methods for the measurement and evaluation of student learning, and his work challenges conventional wisdom and methodological chicanery in educational research, policy and practice.
Briggs’ nominators noted: “Professor Briggs is recognized as the leading expert nationally and internationally on the psychometrics of vertical scaling, growth modeling, and value-added modeling. He has also made significant contributions to research on learning progressions, diagnostic assessment, SAT coaching and the validity of meta-analysis. Across strands of his work, he has examined assumptions and shown how—despite the seeming objectivity of quantitative methods—methodological decisions can materially affect findings and conclusions. Briggs has worked consistently to elucidate the technical foundations of measurement, but he also confronts painful chapters in the history of the measurement field, including discredited hereditarian notions and ‘scientific’ support for the atrocities of the eugenics movement.”
Fellows will be inducted during a ceremony at the 2023 Annual Meeting in Chicago in April. Briggs joins 700 current AERA Fellows nationwide, and seven CU Boulder colleagues as AERA Fellows, including Rubén Donato, Kathy Escamilla, Michele Moses, Bill Penuel, Kathy Schultz, Lorrie Shepard (past AERA president) and Kevin Welner.