April Zenisky

April L. Zenisky received her doctorate in 2004 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; prior to that, she completed her undergraduate studies in English and psychology at Amherst College. Her specialty area is psychometrics and her doctoral dissertation evaluated the effects of selected multi-stage testing design variables on the psychometric quality of licensure exams. She is a nationally renowned expert in the areas of large-scale assessment and computer-based testing. Her research has been presented at national and international conferences, and she has published papers in Applied Measurement in Education, the Journal of Educational Measurement, and in numerous books and encyclopedias related to measurement and educational research including Use of visual displays in research and testing: Coding, interpreting, and reporting data(2015), Computerized multistage adaptive testing: Theory and applications (2014), Improving Large-Scale Assessment in Education (2013), and Elements of Adaptive Testing(2010) and the Handbook of Test Development (2006). Currently, she is Research Associate Professor and Director of Computer-Based Testing Initiatives for the Center for Educational Assessment at UMass, where she has worked on the comprehensive evaluation of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and is now the project manager and psychometrician for computer-based tests for adult basic education programs in Massachusetts. She currently serves as the Associate Editor of the International Journal of Testing and is an occasional manuscript reviewer for several measurement journals. Her research interests include score reporting, innovative item types for computer-based testing, performance assessment, and computerized test designs.