By 21st Century skills, we are interested in the assessment of skills such as digital literacy and collaborative problem solving. The use of these skills is often situated within technologically sophisticated environments: Hence, assessments of them must also be embedded in technologically enhanced testing contexts. This leads to a problem: the technologies involved are evolving rapidly, so that the means of assessment must also be de adapted rapidly, sometimes within just a few years. In terms of measurement, this creates a problem of linkage across time, where the old measurement tasks must be continuously replaced with new one, which will make for complications in maintaining a useful measurement reporting scale over time.

In this presentation, having set this problem in place, Professor Wilson will discuss the following topics:

1. the idea of a learning progression in the context of 21st century skills, giving an example in the domain of digital literacy;
2. how the presence of a learning progression can be used to address this problem; and
3. how the learning progression can also be used to relate large-scale and classroom assessment together.

His research program is focused on four mutually supportive areas.

1. The development of a framework for statistical modeling (Explanatory Item Response Modeling) that allows for the extension and adaptation of psychometric models in ways that make them more responsive to problems that arise in education and other areas of application.
2. The application of measurement framework—the BEAR Assessment System (BAS) — to a range of assessment situations across the social sciences, but concentrating on the development of a body of work that can support use of sound assessment approaches by teachers and other professionals.
3. The exploration of philosophical and historical perspectives on the area of psychometrics.
4. And the development and dissemination of policy positions in educational testing and assessment, based on the research mentioned above.

Throughout all four strands of this broad research agenda, there is a continuing theme of the application of newer conceptual and statistical methods to pressing problems of educational and psychological research. The philosophy underlying his approach to these areas is that there are critical and distinctive problems involved in the measurement, statistical analysis, reporting and usage of psychological and educational constructs and that research methods used to investigate these problems must be sensitive to the best.