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Faculty and Affiliates |
Emeritus Professor Hariharan Swaminathan
During his thirty-year teaching career at the University of Massachusetts, Dr. Swaminathan taught graduate level courses in the areas of univariate and multivariate statistical analysis, research methods, test theory, item response theory, Bayesian statistics, factor analysis, structural equations modeling, hierarchical models, and generalizability theory. The university awarded him the College Outstanding Teacher Award in 1993. Dr. Swaminathan known nationally and internationally for his research on Item Response Theory and psychometrics. He has coauthored two widely used books on item response theory.
Dr. Swaminathan is a scholar of national and international repute. He has to his credit more than 300 research papers and publications, technical reports, and conference papers. He has published two books on item response theory with his colleagues, Professors Ronald Hambleton and Helen Rogers. These books are widely used nationally and internationally as a graduate text on item response theory and by researchers and practitioners in the field of educational measurement.
Dr. Swaminathan has served on numerous technical advisory panels and boards. He was a member of the Graduate Records Examinations (GRE) Board, member of DAC (Design and Analysis Committee) that advises ETS and the National Center for Educational Statistics, the Measurement Research Advisory Panel for the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, The Law School Admissions Council Technical Advisory Panel, and the Canadian Nursing Association to name a few. In addition he has served as a consultant to the National Board of Medical Examiners, the Board of Internal Medicine, National Evaluation Systems, the Florida Supreme Court (which commissioned him to carry out a major study examining the impact of the Florida Bar Examination on minority candidates), the US Naval Personnel Research and Development Center, the US Air Force, the US Army, the Malaysian Ministry of Education and the Malaysian Institute for Administration and Management (INTAN), the Civil Service Commission of Sarawak, and the Indonesian Ministry of Culture and Education.
In addition to teaching graduate level courses in the area of psychometrics and measurement, Dr. Swaminathan has conducted numerous training workshops on Item Response Theory nationally and internationally for such organizations, educational institutions, and agencies as the American Educational Research Association, the National Council for Measurement in Education, the Law School Admission Council, University of Oviedo in Spain, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and Children's Affair, the Malaysian Examination Syndicate, the Examination Center in Indonesia, the University of Western Australia in Perth, and the Republic of Georgia. He was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Annual Psychometric Workshop at the University of Twente, the Netherlands and as a speaker in the Presidential Lecture series for the National Board of Medical Examiners.
