Who I am and why I'm here

I am not an official student in T560; I am auditing the course to learn more about neuropsych and the new media. I am a psychometrician in the Science Education Department at the Center for Astrophysics. My office is at the Harvard College Observatory (60 Garden St. across from the Radcliffe Quad). I finished my doctorate in educational research and measurement in 1989 at the University of South Carolina.

I started my career in education in 1974-75 in South Carolina public schools. I worked in 3 different districts for 11 years. During that time, I started to take courses at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and discovered how much I liked my studies in education research and measurement. For 2 summers, I worked with Masters level students taking the required stat course in education doctoral work. I really enjoyed that work and during the second summer, Dr. Lorin Anderson hired me to work on a national study of Federally funded compensatory-remedial programs (Title I). I am the only person I know who can tell you that a regression discontinuity changed the course of his/her life. Dr. Anderson became my mentor and my boss and I worked on various research studies in South Carolina during the time period when Richard W. Riley was the governor of SC. (Gov. Riley later became Secretary of Education for President Clinton). When I finished my doctoral work, I did "technical assistance" work helping states and districts understand the data used to evaluate Federally funded projects. About 3 years later, the "glamour" of travel constantly had worn thin. My family was tired of it too. I joined the faculty of a small Catholic college in Manchester, NH, and taught research and assessment courses to M.Ed. students. My husband was diagnosed in 1999 with metastatic melanoma and he died in the spring of 2000. The college where I worked announced it was closing in Fall 2000 and so, I had quite a difficult time until 2004, when I joined the Science Education Department at the Center for Astrophysics here at Harvard. I've been working professionally in educational research and measurement for almost 20 years now and I still find my work challenging and engaging.

One of my continuing areas of interest is literacy - I co-authored a book on Adolescent Literacy, which is available free as a pdf. If any of you are interested in this topic, you might find this interesting - http://www.alliance.brown.edu/pubs/adlit/alr_lrp.pdf.

I love to learn and hope to learn from all of you, as well as from David and Bart.

Nancy

Hi

I'm Nancy. I work as a psychometrician (what's that?) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I grew up in South Carolina. My blogspot is "carolinapsychometrica"