What you won't find in my professional resume is my historical focus on education and testing, which you will find below...(To see my resume, click here.)

In terms of my background in "education..." My sixth grade teacher (Simon Morris) told my father that I should become a teacher because I was more interested in seeing that other kids understood how to do the work, than in doing my own work! My career goal from that time through early-college was to be a math-science teacher in junior high. I was the Secretary, Vice-President and President of the Future Teachers of America in my high school, was awarded the Outstanding Student in Science Award in my 1967 graduation class of 900+ students and won a scholarship from the Detroit News for signing up the most new customers on my paper route that same year.

Although they had been projecting a shortage of math and science teachers as I was growing up (1950s, 1960s), after my first year of college, they were predicting a surplus so I changed all my electives to the newest  buzz-- computer science. I received my degree in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science in 1971. As the University of Colorado had NO UNDERGRADUATE courses in computer science, all my elective work was at the graduate level. Upon graduation I entered the Air Force as a programmer for the Air Force Human Resources Laboratory (AFHRL) at Lackland AFB.

In the early years, rising from apprentice programmer to senior analyst, my role was to keep the Comprehensive Occupational Data Analysis Programs (CODAP) system running, design innovative analysis plans, transfer the software to allied foreign nations and give-away the technology to state and local government entities. 

The CODAP system was used to survey, organize, and report tasks and tools actually used in real jobs in the field.  This information is used to establish realistic entry standards, design training curriculum, evaluate training effectiveness, structure promotion test content and feed into other human resource programs as needed. See "The Task Inventory" by Christal and Weissmuller in John Wiley's Handbook of Job Analysis for Business, Industry, and Government, 1988.  One of these special analysis projects included benchmarking learning difficulty of tasks across the 200 Air Force career fields each with 600 to 1200 task statements. I used test-equating concepts to write software that mapped each set of local ratings from diverse fields into a single metric system for each of three ability/content domains.  Other special projects included the use of women in non-traditional jobs, equal pay for equal work, a government-wide survey of acquisition specialists, and modeling of large-scale personnel systems.

Ten years into federal service, I transferred from the Computational Sciences Division to the Manpower and Personnel Research Division, working in the Air Force Learning Abilities Measurement Program (LAMP) Project. The goal of the LAMP Project was to use PCs to measure learning-ability, not prior academic achievement so we could identify and better utilize recruits with little formal background but a lot of native talent.  Having designed projects with PhD Research and Personnel Psychologists for ten years,  I applied for and was accepted into a direct B.A. to PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin in Educational Psychology with a major in Quantitative Methods. Soon my civil service job demands of running the Air Force Learning Abilities Measurement Program (LAMP) Project became overwhelming as other staff members left.  Even though I had to withdraw from UT Austin program, all my class work and professional contacts made during that time were of immeasurable help.

I designed the logic for an adaptive test measuring verbal ability in the LAMP Project.  This tool used the large Air Force verbal item bank with the 3-parameters calibrated from a minimum sample of 2000 Basic Trainees per item. I also designed the proctor network for monitoring any of the 30 testing stations and for consolidating results at the end of the session. By today's standards that isn't much, but in 1980, we had the National Academy of Sciences out taking a tour of our facility three days after the computers were delivered -- and everything functioned as envisioned.

I have used Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) data in many projects -- determining if test scores actually predict success in real jobs.  In addition, I advised the Air Force on scientific & hardware needs for the Interservice Computer-Adaptive-Test (CAT) project and, as a contractor, I managed subcontracts equating subsequent versions of the ASVAB. 

I spent four years working with the Specialty Knowledge Test (SKT) people (Test Psychologists & Subject Matter Experts) at the Air Force Occupational Measurement Squadron (Mr. Monty Stanley) ensuring not only that test items are anchored in job requirements, but that they represented the correct mix across Bloom's taxonomy (as a function of job level) and that the items work as expected in the psychometric shakedowns that followed each administration. We did validity studies to demonstrate that the test results AGREED with the assessment of supervisors and peers in the field.

Because of the really bad GAO reviews which drew national attention in the late 1980s, the IRS used CODAP to perform a job analysis and two years later for a validation project.  In this follow-up IRS project, we developed the Job-Linked Assessment Procedures to formally link job content to training and testing materials. We worked up 4 parallel test forms and performed item analysis linked back to job dimensions in order to ensure fair coverage of all required areas.

In late 2000, I worked on a contract for The Psychological Corporation (TPC) in which we took the raw scores for their most recent administrations of the WAIS II and performed smoothing and preliminary conversion tables for their 2001 Handbook for the age-specific and grade-specific (K-12) interpretations.

Since November 2003, I am back in civil service and work in the Military Testing Section of the Air Force Personnel Center.  I am responsible for managing the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT) as well a providing oversight for the production, deployment, administration, scoring and application of over 130 enlisted promotion tests (Specialty Knowledge Tests [SKTs], Promotion Fitness Exams [PFEs], the USAF Supervisory Exam [USAFSE]) as well as other selection and language proficiency tests. <http://www.icodap.org/041025/index.htm>