Vol. 4, No. 1
Summer 08
Some Scholarly Advice to New Group of Visiting Scholars Published by ETS in Princeton, New Jersey, June 12, 2008
Associate Professor of English Booker T. Anthony attributes much of the professional growth he enjoyed last year to participating in the 2007 Visiting Scholars program, and he recently traveled from Fayetteville State University (FSU) in North Carolina to ETS to talk about it.
His students at Fayetteville State benefited from his experience at ETS, Anthony says, because he was more informed about assigning levels of difficulty to test items. “I always thought I was pretty good at developing tests, but item writing taught me the art of test development,” he says. The relationships scholars develop through the program can be relationships for life, Anthony told the group.
His audience was this year’s Visiting Scholars, who have SCHOLARLY INSIGHT: Booker traveled from 20 universities T. Anthony of Fayetteville State and community colleges in University addressed the 2008 Visiting Scholars. 17 states to participate in the four-week program at the Rosedale campus. The global scholars hail from Indonesia, Jordan and the Netherlands.
“Last year scholars traveled from Princeton to Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York on nights and weekends. Scholars rented cars and hopped trains. The daily rides to and from ETS will be as valuable as the time you will spend in your classes. This is not the month to stay at the hotel and work on university business,” he said. “This month is for you to develop professional bonds for life.”
“As a literature teacher, I had always been curious about how test items for the Praxis™, the SAT® and the GRE® tests were developed,” Anthony says. “I came here last summer with a one-dimensional perspective, more biased than I thought ETS tests were. I was convinced that ETS tests did little for minority groups. The sessions on item writing, fairness review and differential item functioning changed my thinking immediately.”
While he was here, Anthony also talked with ETS employees about FSU’s use of the CriterionSM Online Writing Evaluation service. Last year, he arrived at ETS unsure whether to continue using the service with his students, but says his time talking with the Criterion team made him more aware of its features and benefits. A year later, he is glad he continued to use the service.