AERA Hands Out Honors at Annual Meeting

Members of the Harvard Graduate School of Education community were honored at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) held from April 27 – May 1 in San Francisco.

Associate Professor Andrew Ho received the Palmer O. Johnson Award for an outstanding article appearing in an AERA-sponsored publication. The article “Estimating Achievement Gaps From Test Scores Reported in Ordinal Proficiency Categories,” co-written with Stanford Graduate School of Education Professor Sean Reardon, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’97, was published in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics.

Ho is a psychometrician interested in educational accountability metrics, particularly the intersection between educational statistics and educational policies. Currently, he is working on contrasting between state growth model approaches and developing new gap trend and growth metrics for cross-test comparison and validation.

Additionally, Sharon Nelson-Barber, Ed.M.’81, Ed.D.’85, received the Scholars of Color Distinguished Scholar Award, which is given to a midcareer educator. Nelson-Barber is the CEO of Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, an independent, nonprofit corporation that serves the educational community in the U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands (USAPI), including American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap), Guam, Hawaii, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. Her research explores ways in which teachers can more effectively teach the full spectrum of students in today’s classrooms and centers on the teaching knowledge and abilities of educators in nontraditional contexts spanning indigenous settings in the USAPI, Hawaii, the lower 48 states, and Alaska.