Howard Wainer

Escaping the clutches of truthiness begins with one simple question: 'what is the evidence?' Howard Wainer shows how the sceptical mindset of a data scientist can expose truthiness, nonsense, and outright deception. He evaluates the evidence, or lack thereof, supporting claims in many fields, with special emphasis in education.

Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist

Truth or Truthiness

how to understand, communicate, and control uncertainty through graphical display

Picturing the uncertain world

Graphical Tales of Fate and Deception from Napoleon Bonaparte to Ross Perot

Visual Revelations

Uneducated Guesses challenges everything our policymakers thought they knew about education and education reform, from how to close the achievement gap in public schools to admission standards for top universities. In this explosive book, Howard Wainer uses statistical evidence to show why some of the most widely held beliefs in education today--and the policies that have resulted--are wrong. He shows why colleges that make the SAT optional for applicants end up with underperforming students and inflated national rankings, and why the push to substitute achievement tests for aptitude tests makes no sense. Wainer challenges the thinking behind the enormous rise of advanced placement courses in high schools, and demonstrates why assessing teachers based on how well their students perform on tests--a central pillar of recent education reforms--is woefully misguided. He explains why college rankings are often lacking in hard evidence, why essay questions on tests disadvantage women, why the most grievous errors in education testing are not made by testing organizations--and much more. No one concerned about seeing our children achieve their full potential can afford to ignore this book. With forceful storytelling, wry insight, and a wealth of real-world examples, Uneducated Guesses exposes today's educational policies to the light of empirical evidence, and offers solutions for fairer and more viable future policies.

Using Evidence to Uncover Misguided Education Policies

Uneducated Guesses

In his entertaining and informative book Graphic Discovery, Howard Wainer unlocked the power of graphical display to make complex problems clear. Now he's back with Picturing the Uncertain World, a book that explores how graphs can serve as maps to guide us when the information we have is ambiguous or incomplete. Using a visually diverse sampling of graphical display, from heartrending autobiographical displays of genocide in the Kovno ghetto to the "Pie Chart of Mystery" in a New Yorker cartoon, Wainer illustrates the many ways graphs can be used--and misused--as we try to make sense of an uncertain world. Picturing the Uncertain World takes readers on an extraordinary graphical adventure, revealing how the visual communication of data offers answers to vexing questions yet also highlights the measure of uncertainty in almost everything we do. Are cancer rates higher or lower in rural communities? How can you know how much money to sock away for retirement when you don't know when you'll die? And where exactly did nineteenth-century novelists get their ideas? These are some of the fascinating questions Wainer invites readers to consider. Along the way he traces the origins and development of graphical display, from William Playfair, who pioneered the use of graphs in the eighteenth century, to instances today where the public has been misled through poorly designed graphs. We live in a world full of uncertainty, yet it is within our grasp to take its measure. Read Picturing the Uncertain World and learn how.

How to Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display

Picturing the Uncertain World

A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures

Graphic Discovery

Paul W. Holland

Test fairness is a moral imperative for both the makers and the users of tests. This book focuses on methods for detecting test items that function differently for different groups of examinees and on using this information to improve tests. Of interest to all testing and measurement specialists, it examines modern techniques used routinely to insure test fairness. Three of these relevant to the book's contents are: * detailed reviews of test items by subject matter experts and members of the major subgroups in society (gender, ethnic, and linguistic) that will be represented in the examinee population * comparisons of the predictive validity of the test done separately for each one of the major subgroups of examinees * extensive statistical analyses of the relative performance of major subgroups of examinees on individual test items.

Differential Item Functioning

This volume contains a collection of essays and discussions which serve as an introduction and guide to current research in the area of drawing inferences from self-selected samples. This topic is of direct interest to a professional audience of survey researchers, pollsters, market researchers, policymakers, statisticians, demographers, economists, and sociologists. The essays themselves and their associated critical discussions are clear and careful; the contributors are among the foremost experts in the field.

Drawing Inferences From Self-selected Samples

Xiaohui Wang

Eric T. Bradlow

The measurement models employed to score tests have been evolving over the past century from those that focus on the entire test (true score theory) to models that focus on individual test items (item response theory) to models that use small groups of items (testlets) as the fungible unit from which tests are constructed and scored (testlet response theory, or TRT). In this book, the inventors of TRT trace the history of this evolution and explain the character of modern TRT. Written for researchers and professionals in statistics, psychometrics, and educational psychology, the first part offers an accessible introduction to TRT and its applications. The second part presents a comprehensive, self-contained discussion of the model couched within a fully Bayesian framework. Its parameters are estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures, and the resulting posterior distributions of the parameter estimates yield insights into score stability that were previously unsuspected.

Testlet Response Theory and Its Applications

Lawrence Hubert

For disciplines concerned with human well-being, such as medicine, psychology, and law, statistics must be used in accordance with standards for ethical practice. A Statistical Guide for the Ethically Perplexed illustrates the proper use of probabilistic and statistical reasoning in the behavioral, social, and biomedical sciences. Designed to be consulted when learning formal statistical techniques, the text describes common instances of both correct and false statistical and probabilistic reasoning. Lauded for their contributions to statistics, psychology, and psychometrics, the authors make statistical methods relevant to readers’ day-to-day lives by including real historical situations that demonstrate the role of statistics in reasoning and decision making. The historical vignettes encompass the English case of Sally Clark, breast cancer screening, risk and gambling, the Federal Rules of Evidence, "high-stakes" testing, regulatory issues in medicine, difficulties with observational studies, ethics in human experiments, health statistics, and much more. In addition to these topics, seven U.S. Supreme Court decisions reflect the influence of statistical and psychometric reasoning and interpretation/misinterpretation. Exploring the intersection of ethics and statistics, this comprehensive guide assists readers in becoming critical and ethical consumers and producers of statistical reasoning and analyses. It will help them reason correctly and use statistics in an ethical manner.

A Statistical Guide for the Ethically Perplexed

Jacques Bertin

Vincent P. Barabba

Carl M. Francolini

Alan Julian Izenman

Robert J. K. Jacob

Joseph B. Kruskal

Judith B. Seery

Papers

Proceedings of the First General Conference on Social Graphics, Leesburg, Virginia, October 22-24, 1978

Michael Friendly

Statistical graphing was born in the seventeenth century as a scientific tool, but it quickly escaped all disciplinary bounds. Today graphics are ubiquitous in daily life. Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer detail the history of data visualization and argue that it has not only helped us solve problems, but it has also changed the way we think.

A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication

Henry I. Braun

Technological and theoretical changes over the past decade have altered the way we think about test validity. This book addresses the present and future concerns raised by these developments. Topics discussed include: * the validity of computerized testing * the validity of testing for specialized populations (e.g., minorities, the handicapped) and * new analytic tools to study and measure validity

Test Validity

David Thissen

Confidence Envelopes for Item Response Theory

Good graphs make complex problems clear. From the weather forecast to the Dow Jones average, graphs are so ubiquitous today that it is hard to imagine a world without them. Yet they are a modern invention. This book is the first to comprehensively plot humankind's fascinating efforts to visualize data, from a key seventeenth-century precursor--England's plague-driven initiative to register vital statistics--right up to the latest advances. In a highly readable, richly illustrated story of invention and inventor that mixes science and politics, intrigue and scandal, revolution and shopping, Howard Wainer validates Thoreau's observation that circumstantial evidence can be quite convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk. The story really begins with the eighteenth-century origins of the art, logic, and methods of data display, which emerged, full-grown, in William Playfair's landmark 1786 trade atlas of England and Wales. The remarkable Scot singlehandedly popularized the atheoretical plotting of data to reveal suggestive patterns--an achievement that foretold the graphic explosion of the nineteenth century, with atlases published across the observational sciences as the language of science moved from words to pictures. Next come succinct chapters illustrating the uses and abuses of this marvelous invention more recently, from a murder trial in Connecticut to the Vietnam War's effect on college admissions. Finally Wainer examines the great twentieth-century polymath John Wilder Tukey's vision of future graphic displays and the resultant methods--methods poised to help us make sense of the torrent of data in our information-laden world.

Ronald Flaugher

Robert J. Mislevy

Neil J. Dorans

Bert F. Green

This celebrated primer presents an introduction to all of the key ingredients in understanding computerized adaptive testing technology, test development, statistics, and mental test theory. Based on years of research, this accessible book educates the novice and serves as a compendium of state-of-the-art information for professionals interested in computerized testing in the areas of education, psychology, and other related social sciences. A hypothetical test taken as a prelude to employment is used as a common example throughout to highlight this book's most important features and problems. Changes in the new edition include: *a completely rewritten chapter 2 on the system considerations needed for modern computerized adaptive testing; *a revised chapter 4 to include the latest in methodology surrounding online calibration and in the modeling of testlets; and *a new chapter 10 with helpful information on how test items are really selected, usage patterns, how usage patterns influence the number of new items required, and tools for managing item pools.

A Primer

Computerized Adaptive Testing

Test Scoring provides a summary of traditional true score test theory and modern item response theory related to scoring tests, as well as novel developments resulting from the integration of these approaches. The background material introduced in the first four chapters builds a foundation for the new developments covered in later chapters. These new methods offer alternative psychometric approaches to scoring complex assessments. Each of the book's contributors draws from the classic literature of traditional test theory, as well as psychometric developments of the past decade. The emphasis is on large-scale educational measurement but the topics and procedures may be applied broadly within many measurement contexts. Numerous graphs and illustrative examples based on real tests and actual data are integrated throughout. This multi-authored volume shows the reader how to combine the coded outcomes on individual test items into a numerical summary about the examinee's performance. This book is intended for researchers and students in education and other social sciences interested in educational assessment and policy, the design and development of tests, and the procedures for test administration and scoring. Prerequisites include an introduction to educational and psychological measurement and basic statistics. Knowledge of differential and integral calculus and matrix algebra is helpful but not required.

Howard Wainer

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