Dr. Sarah Quesen (she/her) serves as Director of Assessment Research and Innovation (AR&I) where she directs research and supports evidence-based technical assistance to states, districts, and commercial organizations. Her expertise is in statistics, psychometrics, and assessment and accountability models.
Much of Quesen’s research centers on mitigating bias in the assessment of learning by carefully investigating the validity of score interpretations for all students. She has extensive experience in the evaluation of AI scoring from a psychometric perspective, ensuring that machine and human scores are comparable across student populations. She is committed to identifying ways to enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility considerations in AR&I’s research agenda, business development strategy, and technical assistance work.
Quesen has over 25 years of experience as an educator and continues to serve on the teaching faculty in the Department of Statistics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Prior to joining WestEd, Quesen was a senior research scientist at Pearson, serving as lead psychometrician on complex large-scale assessment contracts. At Pearson, she oversaw the psychometric effort to support the entire assessment cycle: field testing, data review, item banking, test construction, classical item analyses, item response theory (IRT) equating and scaling, reporting, validity studies, technical documentation, and presentations to Technical Advisory Committees (TACs).
Quesen holds a PhD in research methodology from the University of Pittsburgh, an MPH in public health from the West Virginia University School of Medicine, and a BS in culture and communication from New York University.