Hello from Christine Burnham, Ph.D.

Hello everyone,

My name is Christine and I am a Senior Research Associate at Assessment Technology, Inc. (ATI). I have been focused on the intersection of research and education for some time. As an undergraduate at William Smith College in New York State I earned teaching certification in both elementary and special education. The call to conduct research was strong in me, though, and after doing some masters work at Hunter College I came to the University of Arizona where I earned my Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. Upon graduation, I sought a position in which my work would directly benefit teachers and their students. I consider myself lucky to have found my position at ATI where I can do just that.

I’ve been with ATI for almost four years. I spend much of my time analyzing student performance on benchmark assessments and aligning the assessments to high stakes statewide assessments. It’s my job to make sure that the benchmark assessments do a good job of helping teachers decide which students need intervention efforts and in which specific concepts. I hope that my efforts are helping students who need extra help to get it early in the year so that they will be more likely to pass the statewide assessment at the end of the year.

We continually conduct research to find better ways of helping teachers and administrators to use data to guide instruction and remediation. The teacher in me loves to explain data to administrators and teachers so that they can use it more effectively, and to design better, more useful, and more self-explanatory reports so that teachers always have the information they need right at their fingertips.

I hope that this blog will become a thriving conversation among teachers, administrators, ATI, and other researchers in the field so we can all figure out what works, what doesn’t, what is needed, and how to best go about improving education.