Dear colleagues, 

 

The International Objective Measurement Workshop (IOMW) 2025 Conference will be held in Boulder, Colorado, on April 21 and 22, just before the AERA/NCME annual conferences, with a possible additional half-day of workshops on April 20. The conference will take place at the University Memorial Center at the University Colorado, Boulder, located at 1669 Euclid Ave, Boulder, CO (around a 50 min bus ride from Denver where the AERA/NCME will be hosted). IOMW presents an opportunity for scholars interested in the theory and practice of measurement in the human sciences to present research, learn about the most recent developments, and meet with colleagues who share similar interests in an intimate setting. 

 

We have already confirmed the participation of Mijke Rhemtulla as a keynote speaker for the first day. A preliminary title for her address is "Alternatives to Reflective Measurement." We have no doubt it will be thought-provoking!

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The second day will feature a workshop activity led by Benjamin Domingue (Stanford University) to introduce a an exciting new resource for measurement explorations: the Item Repository Warehouse (IRW). The IRW is a public repository of nearly 500 item response datasets (and still growing). The data in the IRW have been standardized such that knowledge of the data standard would permit a user to write functions to perform psychometric analysis on large volumes of data. In this training, we will further describe the IRW data, introduce some critical functionality for showing how data can be filtered/chosen, illustrate its use in some examples, and have a group discussion about our future plans for the IRW and how it can be further improved to work for the measurement community.

 

The deadline for submitting proposals is December 16th 2024 (11:59pm Mountain Time), and details about the submission of paper and symposium proposals (and conference registration) will be available at www.iomw.net during the following weeks. We are very interested in promoting conversations and dialogues, and hence, we are accepting individual paper presentations to be delivered in a round-table format. We will also accept symposia proposals that encourage discussions and debate. We invite both theoretically-focused and applied papers. 

 

Examples of themes we are particularly excited about include (but not limited to): 

 

Measurement and Technology. Sources and types of data have expanded beyond traditional responses to fixed survey questions. Advances in artificial intelligence via large language models have the potential to change the way we think about instrument design, scoring and modeling. The way that all these things interact with a theoretical understanding of the attributes we seek to measure. How can technological advance improve the theory and practice of measurement? We invite papers and sessions that take up these issues through a combination of conceptual or empirical analysis.

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Applications and Modeling. The IOMW provides opportunities to share evolving and ongoing work relevant to the practice of objective measurement, broadly defined, but also more specifically to applications of the Rasch Model and Rasch's perspective on measurement as advanced by Ben Wright and his students. We invite papers that allow you to share work (including work in progress) and get feedback from colleagues in the IOMW community.  

 

Conversations across disciplines and traditions. Measurement is a critical component of scientific inquiry in many areas, including but not limited to the areas of public health, the medical sciences, counseling, the biological sciences, psychology, education, economics, and sociology. Papers likely to stimulate cross-disciplinary perspectives on measurement are especially welcome. 

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Change over time, place, and context. On the one hand, invariance is a critical concept in objective measurement; on the other hand, measures are often applied to highly dynamic systems (e.g., human beings) that change over time and context. This is particularly visible in contemporary debates about the assessment of learning and "growth". We welcome papers on related topics including but not limited to vertical scaling, measurement invariance (of any form), and longitudinal models. 

 

Foundations of measurement. IOMW scholars are committed to examining foundational measurement concepts, including philosophical debates, and the conditions that maximize the validity, reliability, and utility of measures. We welcome conceptual, theoretical, historical and/or comparative papers that help us to understand better what is at stake in the development, use, and discussion of measures. 

 

Please share this announcement with colleagues. Please also feel free to reach out with questions or comments, and we look forward to seeing you in Boulder in April! 

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We will be doing everything possible to keep the cost of conference registration to a bare minimum. We anticipate that it will be no more than $100 (with a lower rate for grad students and early bird registrations).

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All the best, 

 

IOMW 2025 Conference Organizing Committee