FESTSCHRIFT in honor of Ben Wright
26-27 April 2003 (weekend after AERA)
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago

Registration form

We, a committee organizing a Festschrift in honor of Ben Wright, invite presentation proposals addressing some aspect of the theme: "Access, Provocation, and the Development of Professional Identity: Celebrating the Careers of Benjamin D. Wright." Though the choice of the specific topics addressed is for you to make, we hope that you will take up an issue that involves or builds on Ben's extensive contributions to making measurement more accessible and to the fundamental foundations of measurement, his reputation as an irascible provocateur, his selfless support for others' professional development, and/or his multiple careers, as explained below.

We will provide a forum at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, the weekend of Saturday-Sunday, April 26-27 (immediately after AERA), in support of 1) platform presentations; 2) poster presentations, roundtables, and "artifact" displays; and 3) a social event (Saturday evening, 26 April). The conference will close by early afternoon on Sunday, 27 April.

Presentation abstracts of 500-1,000 words should be submitted via e-mail before February 15, 2003 to Mark Wilson at mrwilson@socrates.berkeley.edu before February 15, 2003. Abstracts should take up one or more of the following themes from either a historical or a state-of-the-art perspective: Access to Measurement (including data applications in any field), Foundations of Measurement, Provocation of and Development of Professional Identity, Multiple Careers. More detail on these possibilities is provided below.

All presentations will be eligible for publication in the conference proceedings, to be edited by Mark Wilson and George Engelhard. If you want your work considered for the book, please indicate that you plan to submit a paper at the conference, and provide three copies of the paper to Mark Wilson or George Engelhard. at the conference.

Access to Measurement: simpler, faster estimation (PROX, JMLE UCON); software that works; models for more kinds of data; error, reliability, and fit statistic development; applications to tests, surveys, and assessments in dozens of fields; publishing (MESA Press, RMT, support for OM:TiP, JOM, JAM, PM); associations (the SIG, IOM); meetings (MOMS, AERA/SIG, IOMW); and constant improvement to all of that via substantive interactions with students and colleagues.

Foundations of Measurement: measurement as a scientific enterprise, relation to scientific revolutions, relation to foundational ideas such as specific objectivity and additive conjoint measurement, relation to foundational work of figures such as Thurstone, Guttman and Rasch.

Provocation and Development of Professional Identity: Ben is well-known for strongly challenging and even abruptly dismissing anything that strikes him as irrelevant, foolish, or half-baked, and he seems to have had explicit reasons for behaving in this manner, reasons stemming from his work on identity development with Bruno Bettelheim. Personal accounts of Ben's successes and failures in this regard are of particular interest.

Multiple Careers: In addition to his work in measurement theory and practice, Ben worked as a physicist, and then as a psychologist and factor analyst. He taught a course on the psychology of becoming a teacher for many years, and continued working in this area long after most people associated him primarily with Rasch measurement. Even within the area of measurement alone, Ben's early work on estimation, models, fit, error, reliability, and software stands in considerable contrast with his later emphases on applications, organizations, and publishing. Papers touching on more than one of these careers will be of special interest.

See you in April in Chicago!

William Fisher (chair), David Andrich, Kendon Conrad, George Engelhard, Allen Heinemann, Mary Lunz, Geoff Masters, Alan Tennant, Ev Smith, Mark Wilson

FESTSCHRIFT in honor of Ben Wright, 26-27 April 2003 … Rasch Measurement Transactions, 2002, 16:3 p.885

Rasch Publications
Rasch Measurement Transactions (free, online)	Rasch Measurement research papers (free, online)	Probabilistic Models for Some Intelligence and Attainment Tests, Georg Rasch	Applying the Rasch Model 3rd. Ed., Bond & Fox	Best Test Design, Wright & Stone
Rating Scale Analysis, Wright & Masters	Introduction to Rasch Measurement, E. Smith & R. Smith	Introduction to Many-Facet Rasch Measurement, Thomas Eckes	Invariant Measurement: Using Rasch Models in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences, George Engelhard, Jr.	Statistical Analyses for Language Testers, Rita Green
Rasch Models: Foundations, Recent Developments, and Applications, Fischer & Molenaar	Journal of Applied Measurement	Rasch models for measurement, David Andrich	Constructing Measures, Mark Wilson	Rasch Analysis in the Human Sciences, Boone, Stave, Yale
in Spanish:	Análisis de Rasch para todos, Agustín Tristán		Mediciones, Posicionamientos y Diagnósticos Competitivos, Juan Ramón Oreja Rodríguez

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