Benjamin Drake Wright
| Benjamin Drake Wright | |
|---|---|
Benjamin D. Wright with his ruler
|
|
| Born |
March 30, 1926 Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Died | October 31, 2015 (aged 89) Chicago, Illinois |
| Fields | Physics, Psychology, Education, Psychometrics |
| Institutions | University of Chicago |
| Alma mater | Cornell |
| Doctoral advisor | John R. Platt |
| Doctoral students | Bruce H. Choppin (1940–1983) and over 100 others |
| Known for | Rasch measurement theory, methods, estimation, models, applications |
| Influences | Charles Townes, Leonard Jimmie Savage, Georg Rasch, Sigmund Freud |
| Influenced | Test-, survey-, and assessment-based measurement practices in education and health care, globally |
| Notable awards | Association of Test Publishers Career Achievement Award in Computer-Based Testing, 2001 Institute for Objective Measurement Lifetime Achievement Award, 2003 |
Benjamin Drake Wright (March 30, 1926 – October 25, 2015) was an American psychometrician. He is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of Georg Rasch's measurement principles and models. In the wake of what Rasch referred to as Wright's “almost unbelievable activity in this field” in the period from 1960 to 1972, Rasch's ideas entered the mainstream in high-stakes testing, professional certification and licensure examinations, and in research employing tests, and surveys and assessments across a range of fields. Wright's seminal contributions to measurement continued until 2001, and included articulation of philosophical principles, production of practical results and applications, software development, development of estimation methods and model fit statistics, vigorous support for students and colleagues, and the founding of professional societies and new publications.
Wright was born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, on March 30, 1926. He retired in October, 2001.
Wright’s experiences at age seven with mental testing sparked his lifelong interest in tests and test questions. Wright’s mother, Dorothy Wright (née Wadhams, 1902–1995), was a lifelong advocate of progressive education. In the summer of 1933, his mother sent him to Housatonic Camp in Canaan, Connecticut, where he was individually given a battery of tests over the course of that summer. The tests were administered by teachers and staff from the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, New York City. Wright subsequently attended Little Red over the course of grades 2 and 4 to 7. Thus, Wright's education was shaped by early advocates of integrating scientific assessment into the classroom, including Elisabeth Irwin and Bank Street College founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell. At the time, the Little Red course of study was based on curricula outlined in Mitchell's Here and Now Story Book and Young Geographers.
From 1940 to 1944, Wright attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. In June 1944, at age 18, Wright enlisted in the U.S. Navy. As the result of his score on the Army Navy College Qualifying Test, Wright was assigned to the V-12 Navy College Training Program and to fulfill his military duty at Cornell University studying physics. The Cornell physics faculty included Richard Feynman who, in parallel with John von Neumann, had begun adapting an IBM business punch card machine to solve the Los Alamos physicists’ linear equations more quickly. This work led to the modern computer. As well as graduating with Honors from the physics program within three years, Wright's Cornell transcript shows he was awarded 87 additional credit hours “for work in the School of Electrical Engineering…under the V-12 program,” indicating the extent of Wright’s work with early computer prototypes for the US military.
...
Wikipedia