Irwin Kirsch

Irwin Kirsch is the Ralph Tyler Chair in Large Scale Assessment and Director of the Center for Global Assessment at ETS in Princeton, NJ. In his role as director of the center he oversees several teams of research scientists, assessment designers and platform engineers who are responsible for the development, management and implementation of various large-scale national and international assessments. Over the course of his career, Dr. Kirsch has worked in close collaboration with a number of state, national and international organizations including the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor, the World Bank, UNESCO, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He currently oversees the development and conduct of the two largest international assessments that provide policy makers and key stakeholders with national and international comparative data on literacy and workforce preparedness – PIAAC and PISA. In addition to his assessment work, Dr. Kirsch is a member of the ETS research management team, serves on the board of a non-profit literacy organization, and as a reviewer for several journals. He has also published numerous research articles and book chapters dealing with issues around designing, developing and interpreting cognitive-based scales and has written a number of policy reports using large-scale assessment data that focus on the growing importance of skills and their connections to life outcomes. As part of his interest in this area Dr. Kirsch has conducted research on using evidence centered design principles to link assessment and learning.