Looking Back

In 2006, Paul W. Holland retired from Educational Testing Service (ETS) after a career spanning five decades. In 2008, ETS sponsored a conference, Looking Back, honoring his contributions to applied and theoretical psychometrics and statistics. Looking Back attracted a large audience that came to pay homage to Paul Holland and to hear presentations by colleagues who worked with him in special ways over those 40+ years. This book contains papers based on these presentations, as well as vignettes provided by Paul Holland before each section.

The papers in this book attest to how Paul Holland's pioneering ideas influenced and continue to influence several fields such as social networks, causal inference, item response theory, equating, and DIF.  He applied statistical thinking to a broad range of ETS activities in test development, statistical analysis, test security, and operations. The original papers contained in this book provide historical context for Paul Holland’s work alongside commentary on some of his major contributions by noteworthy statisticians working today.