Interview with Dr. Tracy Gardner, Psychometrician and Assessments Leader

Here at Origins, our goal is to share conversations with STEAM leaders who break the mold, and Dr. Gardner is an educational leader, mentor, and executive who absolutely fits the bill.

Click the YouTube video above to watch the full video interview.

We are so excited to share our first conversation with STEAM leader and psychometrician extraordinaire, Dr. Tracy Gardner! And this one’s personal–Dr. Tracy Gardner has been a leader and boss both to me and my Origins co-founder, Stephanie Beattie. Dr. Gardner’s grace under pressure, encouragement of her team, and incredible support of her team’s growth has been an up-close and personal inspiration to us about what great bosses look like.

As a quick refresher, Origins with Dr. Natasha Wilson is where we explore the unique origins stories from the childhoods of leaders in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (also known as STEAM). We’re thrilled to be sharing our conversation with Dr. Gardner today.

Dr. Gardner has had an extensive career in educational measurement and psychometrics, the field concerned with the measurement of mental attributes (such as intelligence), but especially with the statistical tools that relate the measurement of student performance on educational assessments to achievement and aptitude. Dr. Gardner received her Ph.D. in Research Methodology from the University of Pittsburgh. Throughout her career, she has supervised teams of psychometricians and content specialists at large testing companies such as Pearson, Harcourt, and GED, the latter being where she led the team who developed the New GED, a test that has played a major role in providing a pathway for adult learning across the U.S. to earn a high school diploma equivalent. 

More recently, she has served in executive level positions at New Meridian and the Classic Learning Test, where she has provided strategic leadership resulting in new assessments that serve a wide variety of student needs. Her extensive experience has proven Dr. Gardner to be a leader of leaders in the psychometric community. 

Dr. Gardner is a wife and a mother of six classically-educated children. We welcome Dr. Gardner to Origins and are excited to share more about her background, education, and career. Below is a transcript of the conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. You can find the full, uncut video on Origin’s YouTube page, linked at the end of the interview.

Dr. Natasha Wilson (NW): Welcome, Dr. Tracy Gardner! First things first: could you give us a brief description of the field of psychometrics for those who are not familiar with it?

Dr. Tracy Gardner (TG): Yes. I'm delighted to be here, Natasha. Thanks for having me.

Psychometrics is a branch within statistics. And the goal of psychometrics is to measure what people know. Sometimes it's educational tests. Sometimes it's psychological tests. Sometimes it's the way that you think or the way you engage with the world. 

But the role of psychometrics is to measure how people think and what they know. It's an interaction of both statistical techniques and also content knowledge.

For example, if you want to measure what a student knows in mathematics or grammar, you define the skills that are important and then you create test questions that will measure those specific tasks that you're trying to understand. 

The process of psychometrics is collecting the evidence and then analyzing it. Ultimately, with psychometrics, you'd like to build tests that are both valid and reliable–valid meaning that they measure what you think they're measuring, whether it's math content knowledge or reading comprehension or grammar skills, and reliable meaning that if you were to take the test again, you'd get a similar answer. 

NW: And can you elaborate a bit on the importance of psychometrics?

TG: If we're taking the time to measure what a student knows, we want to make sure we're measuring the right thing. 

If we're supposed to be measuring computation skills, we want to measure those. We don't want to measure some other skill. There are some test questions, for example, where we think we're measuring the student's ability to do math computation, to add and subtract two-digit numbers with rounding. But instead we set the question up in such a way that the student gets the correct answer for the wrong reason. Maybe they performed a trick and it's not actually measuring math knowledge at all–it's measuring their ability to see some trick.

Reliability is important as well because if today when I take the test I do really well, and tomorrow I take a similar test and I don't do well, then it's not reliable. You want to be able to accurately measure what students know. 

And so when you're looking for an assessment, you want to make sure that it's fair, that the questions measure the kinds of skills that you think they're measuring, and that it does it in a reliable way so that the information is actually informing the teacher, the parent, the student, what it is that they're doing well in and what they're not doing well in. 

NW: That’s a great intro to the field, thank you. We’d love to learn a little more about your background. Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood and how you grew up?

TG: Absolutely. I grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s when computers were just sort of coming into the forefront. Our first computer was a Commodore 64. 

I am the daughter of a chemist, and my dad also became a statistician and a quality engineer. So I grew up in a household that loved math and science. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. She was home my whole childhood. But my dad used to do all kinds of experiments at home, and he was very much into bringing math into all kinds of things.

For example, in the late 1970s, gas was very expensive. My dad used to keep gas mileage and he would plot reports of how much gas mileage he was getting for his gas. So he documented all the data and he would put it into the computer and write computer programs in BASIC to calculate gas mileage. I was super interested in this, so he taught me how to do it. And the very first program that I wrote in BASIC was for my bowling scores. My dad taught me how to capture the data of my bowling scores and calculate my averages over time, and then to make predictions based on how I was growing over the year and when the likelihood would be that I would get a score of 125 or 150 out of 300.

So I had one of those very interesting childhoods where math and science was everywhere. This was during a time when a lot of girls were not encouraged to go into math and science, but my household was very different.

NW: That’s wonderful that your parents were so encouraging. How did they approach your early education?

TG: My parents took a very big interest in my schoolwork. In fact, one time when I was in second grade, when we were learning how to do multiplication and division, I brought home a worksheet that had 7 divided by 0 on it. And as you know, that is undefined.

And my dad was the kind of dad that wrote a letter to the math teacher indicating that this math problem was incorrect and that the answer was not 0. In fact, it was undefined, and we should do our due diligence in teaching children about mathematics and proper mathematics. 

So I was very lucky to live in a family that was very interested in teaching what the joys of math and science could bring to your education.

NW: It sounds like you had a pretty joyous family life. Were there times where you maybe started not to feel like you fit in with others, because of the uniqueness of your family or for other reasons?

TG: Yeah, I'm really glad that you asked that question because even though my family life was very joyful, I definitely had different experiences where I didn't feel like I fit in. I grew up in a very small Italian community in Western New York, and almost everyone in my school and in my neighborhood was Italian, and most of my friends went to Catholic church. And my family was not really a church-going family. I had a desire in my heart to be connected to God.

So I just decided to be bold and I asked my parents to take me. And they did. You know, they had no issues with taking me and picking me up or letting me go with other families. 

Another challenging experience I had as a child is I was one of those children that was an adult pleaser, a people pleaser, a teacher pleaser, and I worked really hard. I had a very high work ethic and I wanted to do well. I wanted to get good grades. I wanted to be a good student. And there were students that made fun of me for that. 

In the early to mid 80s, it was kind of embarrassing to be a good student. It wasn't something that a lot of students strove to be. It was more fun to be popular or the great athlete or something like that.

But thankfully I had supportive parents and found a few good friends, both at school and at church. And also, I did ballet. There were other students that were sort of like me in ballet. So even though I was kind of the nerdy student that kids like to make fun of, I thankfully found my little group of people and was able to thrive within that group and not give into the pressure that some of the other students were imposing upon me.

NW: What role do you think your ballet had in your growth as a woman who's also interested in mathematics and science?

TG: Ballet was so important for me because it gave me a way to express who I was and what I believed in through movement. And I was actually a little bit of a shy kid. Ballet was an outlet that allowed me to build confidence by being on a stage and by being able to express myself through movement. It helped prepare me for my whole life. 

By the time I went to college, I was a ballet major for a year and then ultimately transitioned away from it because of other things. Things around the weight requirements became very challenging for me, and it was beginning to affect my mental health at that point. 

But it set me up for everything else. It inspired the work ethic in me. It taught me how to be good at managing my time and prioritizing how I wanted to live my life. By the time I got to graduate school and was working on very challenging classes and then ultimately having to defend a dissertation, I had no doubt that ballet set me up for success in those other paths.

Ballet is basically applied physics. You have to learn how to control your body and your energy–pushing down into the floor while lifting up at the same time in order to have balance, learning how to turn, focusing your spot. All of these things were physics in action, and so there are so many things about ballet that helped to prepare me for a career in math and science. 

At the time, I didn't really see the relationships between the two. In fact, I thought it was kind of bizarre that I was a ballerina that loved math and science. But as I got older and more understood the relationships among all of those, it became clear to me that they weren't as diverse of skill sets as I thought they were when I was a child.

NW: That's so interesting. I can see how the discipline and work ethic required for ballet translated into the disciplines of science and mathematics. Looking back, were there any other clues growing up that pointed to your current career in psychometrics?

TG: Oh my goodness, yes! When I look back over my childhood, I can see there were clues from the time I was very young. Going back to second grade, we were taking multiplication tests. It was 1982, and I was in Mrs. Furman's class. And if you could do your multiplication tables in a certain amount of time, you were able to have a pizza party at her house. 

I really wanted to go to her house. I just thought going to Mrs. Fuhrman's house was like meeting the president of the United States. That's how important it was to me. She was such an influential teacher in my history that I wanted to do whatever it took. 

So that was an assessment where I just had to get very fast at doing the multiplication tables so that I could go have a pizza party at her house. That was an assessment that was doing something according to a certain set of guidelines and rules to achieve a certain score to get an outcome. So that was my first clue that I liked testing–I liked the competition of it and what the outcome related to. 

I also loved it when I got to take the SAT. I remember just the juices that flew through me on that Saturday morning when I had to show up with my number two pencils and sit for this exam and wait for my scores to come in. And I had the same exhilaration when I got to take the GRE when I was going into graduate school. 

In college, I became a math and psychology double major after transitioning from ballet when I realized there was no way I was going to keep my weight at the weight they wanted me to keep it to continue performing. And I realized that the intersection of math and psychology was basically psychometrics–looking at how a mind works, how students learn, how to measure what you know. 

And I was just done. I was like, this is it. This is what I'm going to do for my life. I want to make tests. I loved taking tests as a kid. And I want to make tests. 

NW: You obviously have to go through extensive training to do the work that you do. Tell me about your graduate school education–how did you choose which university to attend?

TG: I wanted to be in a city. The University of Chicago and Pittsburgh were two that I was very interested in. I ultimately ended up at Pitt for two reasons. One, Huixing Tang was a graduate of Pitt who was living in San Antonio at the time. This was 1995. And I had the opportunity to meet with him and ask him about his journey into psychometrics, and that personal story of connecting with him really turned me on to investigating Pitt a little more closely. 

Secondly, when I went to interview at Pitt, I was supposed to stay at Dr. Tony Nitko's house. He was the chair of the department, but he was undergoing renovations in his house at the time. So they had me stay with Dr. Suzanne Lane, who just by chance had just had a baby six months ago. I was 21 years old at the time. And to see this female professor with a new baby who was living her dream of being in academia and having a baby, was just it. I was like, I'm sold. This is where I want to come.

NW: Absolutely. Speaking of children, how does your knowledge of the field play into your role as parent?

My kids were indoctrinated from very young ages that taking a test is a day of celebration because you get to show what you know. The good news is that there's going to be things that you get to celebrate that you've mastered. 

The other part of it, though, is there are things that you don't know. The test helps identify what those things are, and that's great news. It's like when you're sick and you go to the doctor. The whole point of going to the doctor is to get an assessment of what we need to do to make you better and stronger. And that's the whole point of taking tests as well. 

To me, tests are not perfect and there's been some history of tests that need to improve. But even still, getting information is helpful. That's what makes us improve. That's what gives us a way to know where our strengths are and where our areas of improvement are so that we can keep getting better as we strive for lifelong learning. 

NW: That makes a lot of sense. I'm wondering, are there some misconceptions that other people have about psychometrics that you can dispel?

TG:  Sure. I first became a psychometrician in 2000, so I've been doing this now for about 23 years. When I first started in my first job at Harcourt, I was 26 years old, and some of the people that I met would joke and call me terms like “the psychomagician” or “the psycho.” And I would ask them, why do you say that? 

And they said, well, you know, Tracy, to us, psychometrics is just voodoo. As far as we know, you guys go behind some curtain or you get in some black box and you make some numbers up and put them on a score report.

People don't really understand that there is a set of standards that really dictate how psychometrics work. 

One of the key sets of standards that we follow are the Standards for Educational and Psychological Measurement, which is a joint set of standards put out by the National Council of Measurement and Education, along with the American Psychological Corporation and the American Educational Research Association. It's a 200-page document that basically identifies all of the standards that we should be following for fairness, validity, reliability, test use, item development, form development, and reporting of scores. This is a manual that you can follow in order to do great work that's tied to very, very thoughtful ideals of how psychometrics should work.

Moreover, there's an ED measurement–we call it the ED Measurement Bible–where the field is currently working on its fifth edition. Linda Cook, who is a measurement visionary from ETS (retired now) is overseeing the development of ED Measurement 5 along with Suzanne Lane, who was my advisor at University of Pittsburgh. There's about 20 chapters in there that guides the whole industry on how to build tests and all of the things that we should be considering from conceptualization of what the skills are all the way through scoring and reporting and getting scores on score reports. 

I think most people who are not involved in psychometrics in the way that I am don't really know that all of these wonderful resources exist.

NW: That’s great to know. As you look back on your early career, what are some highlights that stand out?

TG: One of my favorite opportunities was to be the Senior Director of Assessment for the GED program. Up through 2014, the GED assessment was typically seen as a minimal competency test and it didn't really carry a lot of power. If you passed the GED, there was a point in time where people would say, well, who cares? It's a minimum competency test. What does that actually mean? What can you actually do if you pass the GED? 

We had a goal to radically change what it meant to have a GED credential. And so we raised the standards. 

We aligned it to the Common Core State Standards. We required that students be able to read complex texts, primary sources, the Great American Conversation–to read the kinds of texts that matter, the kinds of text that define an educated citizenry. And then we wanted them to be able to reason. We wanted them to be able to look at the text and be able to evaluate what a good argument was. We required students to write an essay that showed an argument that had evidence from the text to support their answer and to do it with solid grammar and development of ideas. 

So we really wanted to raise the bar of what the GED credential meant, and that was definitely a highlight of my career. 

NW: That's great. And what about any challenges that stand out?

TG: Yes, I think one of the hardest challenges for me was learning how to balance a career with being a wife and a mother. I have six children that are completely amazing, and I really love spending time with them and doing the kinds of things that any mother wants to do: reading to them, going to their games, being home at night, putting them to bed, having dinner with them, hearing their stories, going to their school events. And those are the things I think that every mother wants to do with their children. 

But I also wanted to be excellent at my work. I wanted to do the kind of work that achieved results. I wanted to build my teams in such ways that we could overcome obstacles and trust one another and debate ideas. And in order to be an excellent leader, you've got to be there for the teams that you work with. And every crisis doesn't happen from nine to five Monday through Friday. Sometimes you have to solve crises over the weekend or overnight. 

And so I think the biggest challenge for me in my work was finding a balance where I could still be a great leader and build strong teams while also being able to unplug myself from that work so that when I was home with my children, I could have dinner with them, and talk about their day, and read great books with them, and talk about how those books impact them, and have a prayer life with our kids.

Those were some of the challenges. I had babies at a time where there were no places to pump your milk at work. You had to go into a bathroom stall, and I traveled a lot and I had to bring my backpack with me so that I could pump milk while I was away. I didn't really always have female leaders that I could turn to and ask, you know, how do you do this? How do you be a mom and be a leader and be a worker at the same time? 

And so I've tried to be that, particularly to young women and moms who are trying to navigate that. But I've also tried to be an inspiration to men and women of all different walks of life. There's all kinds of people who have experienced their own trouble spots in their career and have nobody to believe in them or nobody to support them or nobody to help them figure out how to navigate this complex thing we call life. 

NW: Any tips you would offer to people who may be struggling in their own work lives?

TG: One of the things that I've learned in adulthood is that it's okay to ask for help. I never was one to ask for help. I wanted to just figure out how to do it myself. I figured that the only way to be successful is just to do everything myself.

Now, as an almost 50-year-old woman, I’ve realized that you're not going to get as far as you can go if you do everything yourself. There's a lot of people that are willing and able to help you and it's okay to ask for help. In fact, it's a strength to be able to do that. 

I want to be able to give back to those kids and those young people who don't know that yet. If I can be a source of inspiration to some, then at the end of my life, my legacy will have been made.

NW: It’s wonderful to hear that, and very inspiring.

TG: Thank you.

NW: Thank you, Tracy, for joining us here at Origins. Your story has been great to hear, and we also loved learning more about the field of psychometrics. I don't think that many people have heard of the field of psychometrics. And you've been a prolific leader in psychometrics, and we're just really happy to have you here. Thank you for interviewing with us.

TG: Thank you, Natasha. It's been my delight and privilege to be here with you today.

Thank you for reading! Subscribe to our Substack and never miss an interview. We also share resources for people interested in growing in their STEAM careers, from job listings to scholarship opportunities and more.

You can also find us at www.originsconvo.com as well as on Twitter and Instagram using the handle, @originsconvo. If you’re interested in watching the full, uncut version of the interview, you can do so at our YouTube page.