The Psychometric Laboratory is home to an array of educational and psychological measurement projects. This Lab provides leadership, training, consultation, and state-of-the-art solutions to challenging applied and methodological problems in measurement, assessment, and psychometrics. The Laboratory was established by Professor Brian F. French in 2008, when he joined the faculty at WSU. Our expertise lies in both the application and study of psychometric methods. There is a keen focus on validity issues, as it relates to decisions about individuals and groups. Our focal areas of research include large and small scale assessment, educational and psychological measurement issues related to score validity, and simulation and Monte Carlo work to study methodological issues in this area. Our work is supported through external grants and contracts. Our work is consistently published in scholarly journals and presented at national and international meetings.

If you are interested in working or studying in the Psychometric Laboratory, please contact Brian F. French at frenchb@wsu.edu.

MERIT stands for Multimedia in Education: Research with Instructional Techniques. The use of technology and multimedia in the classroom is not new. But it’s more complex now than ever before. The MERIT Lab has an especially keen focus on improving multimedia instruction, learning, and performance, with consideration of both cognition and affect perspectives.

Our focal areas of research – which is supported through external grants and contracts – currently include using techniques such as concept mapping, refutational text, and self-explanation to address conceptual change, critical thinking, and content learning gains. Further, we investigate multimedia principles (e.g. seductive details, redundancy, etc.) in context of teaching and learning in computer-based multimedia learning environments across various populations.

If you are interested in working or studying in the MERIT Lab, please contact Olusola Adesope at olusola.adesope@wsu.edu or Kira Carbonneau at kira.carbonneau@wsu.edu

The Large-Scale Data lab or the LSD lab is part of the Learning and Performance Research Center (LPRC) at WSU College of Education. The lab was created in May 2019 with the support from the LPRC, the 2019-2020 WSU College of Education High-Risk/High-Reward grant, and the 2019-2021 WSU New Faculty Seed Grant. Currently, it is co-directed by Drs. Shenghai Dai and Kira Carbonneau, both are faculty of WSU Educational Psychology.

The purpose of the LSD lab is to provide our faculty and students with a physical secured space required by confidential data licensing such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and other large-scale assessment and survey programs. Specifically, the lab has the capacity and personnel to support the storage and analysis for confidential large-scale data: (1) it is of high-security and currently holding restricted-use data licenses from the federal government; (2) it is equipped with standalone powerful computers and software that can handle big data, and (3) personnel have expertise in big-data analytics and quantitative methods, and also have experience collaborating with scholars across multiple fields.

If you are interested in working or studying in the LSD lab, please contact Shenghai Dai at s.dai@wsu.edu or Kira Carbonneau at kira.carbonneau@wsu.edu