JOB TALK: Dr. Ben Domingue

In education and throughout social science, the validity of findings from empirical research often hinges upon the process of measurement. This talk will cover several aspects of my research to date that are unified by careful attention to how the relevant phenomena are measured. When studying student ability, a fundamentally important question is whether test scores are interval (i.e., whether changes in the scale have consistent meaning in terms of underlying student ability). My work, an extension of the approach suggested in Karabatsos (2001), has resulted in free software that can be readily applied to multiple choice data in an attempt to examine whether test scores have interval properties. I describe the techniques that underlie this approach and demonstrate how it can be used. The second talk focuses on the genetic similarity of spouses, an important issue since heritability estimates typically assume that spousal pairings are independent of genotype. I describe a generic metric we developed and discuss how it can be used to quantify genetic and educational similarity between spouses. Finally, I discuss a novel proposal for studying tracking. At the core of the proposed research is the idea that we can use course-taking data from a large school district to "measure" tracking in a novel way. This approach has the potential to yield a much more informative picture of how and where tracking happens, who is tracked, and what the effects of tracking are.

I am a quantitative social scientist with expertise in a variety of areas including educational measurement and evaluation, social network analysis, and biodemography. My research in education has focused on the construction and use of test score scales. Alongside my research on the use of test score scales, I have worked with a variety of public agencies on projects related to the crafting of policies which use test scores for the purposes of school or teacher evaluation. One example of this work is my collaboration with ICFES (the national testing agency in Colombia) to develop an evaluation system for Colombian universities. Outside of education, I am interested in social network and genetics, primarily as they are related to public health. I received my PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder's School of Education in 2012 and am currently a research associate at the Institute of Behavioral Science (University of Colorado) and a visiting researcher at the Population Research Center (University of Texas at Austin).