Interdisciplinary Seminar: Matthias von Davier, Boston College

Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing in Educational Measurement

Presented by Matthias von Davier, Boston College

Friday, April 21, 2023
11:00 a.m. ET
Webex Link

This talk will provide an overview of the applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in educational measurement, focusing on automated item generation, automated scoring, and test assembly in multilingual assessments. We will discuss the potential benefits of AI and NLP for educational measurement, including increased efficiency, improved accuracy and reliability of assessment, and increased access to assessment technology for lowresourcelanguages. We will examine the current state of the technology, including challenges associated with developing and deploying AI and NLP-based educational assessment systems. We will also discuss future directions for research and development in this area, including the development of methods for assessing and validating AI- and NLP-based systems and the potential for AI and NLP to improve assessment fairness and reduce assessment bias.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Matthias von Davier is the Executive Director at TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center and the Monan Professor in Education at Boston College. Dr. von Davier’s research focuses on developing psychometric models for analyzing data from complex item and respondent samples and on integrating diagnostic procedures into these methods. His areas of expertise include topics such as item response theory, latent class analysis, classification and mixture distribution models, diagnostic models, computational statistics, person-fit, item-fit, and model checking, as well as hierarchical extension of models for categorical data analysis and the analytical methodologies used in large scale educational surveys. Dr. von Davier’s applied research uses these methodologies to analyze data from educational testing and large-scale survey assessments of student skills & adult literacy, to computer-based assessment of skills and the analysis of questionnaire data.