Margaret Wu

Margaret Wu is an Australian statistician and psychometrician who specialises in educational management. Wu helped to design the Watterson estimator which can be used to determine the genetic diversity of a population. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne.

Margaret Wu
Alma materUniversity of Melbourne
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Scientific career
InstitutionsMonash University
ThesisThe application of item response theory to measure problem-solving proficiencies (2004)

Early life

Wu studied statistics at the University of Melbourne and graduated in 1972.[1] She worked at Monash University as a research assistant from 1973 to 1988, where she taught herself to program.[2] She worked with Watterson on the Watterson estimator, a means to determine the genetic diversity of a population.[2] Despite her contributions to high-impact publications, Wu was never named as an author, and was not encouraged to complete a PhD.[2]

Research and career

Wu joined CSIRO as a technical officer in 1997.[1] She earned a graduate diploma in computer studies from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1985. Wu became a high school teacher at Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar School, teaching Chinese and mathematics.[1] She was appointed as a senior research fellow in the Australian Council of Educational Research Development (ACER) in 1992, where she was deputy director of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Working with ACER and the University of Melbourne, Wu completed her master's, which was awarded the Freda Cohen Award for the Best Masters Thesis in Education. Wu remained at the University of Melbourne for her PhD, modelling student assessment data with underlying abilities modelled as latent variables.[1]

She was appointed associate professor at the University of Melbourne in 2008. She studied whether collaborative teams of teachers using evidence-based decisions influenced student achievement.[3] She was made a professor at Victoria University, Melbourne in 2012. Wu is sceptical about the importance of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and PISA results due to measurement errors acquired during collection of data.[4] She is also concerned about the inferences that can be drawn from assessment data, such as using student performance to evaluate teacher performance.[5][6][7] She believes that whilst teachers contribute to education, other factors are likely to be more important.[8] After the data was published on the website My School, Wu began to speak up about the misuse of standardised testing.[8][9] Her efforts resulted into an enquiry into the effectiveness of NAPLAN.[10] Her findings were confirmed in 2018, when Les Perelman and Walt Haney reported that NAPLAN results of one million students should "be discarded".[11][12]

In 1995, Wu began to concentrate on the development of Item Response Theory.[13] She developed two item response software programs that analyse PISA and TIMSS data; ACER ConQuest (1998) and the R-package TAM (2010).[14][15][16]

Wu's contributions to the Watterson estimator were uncovered by a team of undergraduate students led by Emilia Huerta-Sánchez (Brown University) and Rori Rohlfs (San Francisco State University).[1][2][17] The students searched every issue of Theoretical Population Biology published between 1970 and 1990. She was one of several "acknowledged programmers", all of whom were women, who contributed significantly to highly cited manuscripts.[17]

References
  1. "From hidden contributor to professor: an interview with Margaret Wu". Genes to Genomes. 2019-02-07. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  2. Yong, Ed (2019-02-11). "The Women Who Contributed to Science but Were Buried in Footnotes". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  3. "The influence of evidence-based decisions by collaborative teacher teams on student achievement - The University of Melbourne". www.findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  4. "It's time to be honest with parents about NAPLAN: your child's report is misleading, here's how". EduResearch Matters. 2018-05-15. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  5. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (2015-09-27), Leaning too far? PISA, policy and Australia's 'top five' ambitions, retrieved 2019-02-12
  6. Fox, Rebecca (2012-03-06). "Warning on teacher performance data". Otago Daily Times Online News. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  7. "TESTING times" (PDF). AEUVIC. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  8. NZEI Te Riu Roa (2012-03-20), Margaret Wu - Student Assessment Data for Accountability, retrieved 2019-02-12
  9. Donnelly, Kevin (2011-02-02). "The failed education revolution". ABC News. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  10. Wu, Margaret; Hornsby, David (August 2014). "Inappropriate uses of NAPLAN results". Practically Primary. 19 (2): 16.
  11. Robinson, national education reporter Natasha (2018-08-27). "NAPLAN results so flawed they should be discarded, US experts say". ABC News. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  12. Stone, Elizabeth (2018-05-05). "Drumbeat to ditch NAPLAN is growing louder - and rightly so". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  13. "Educational Measurement Solutions website". www.edmeasurement.com.au. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  14. "TAM Tutorials". www.edmeasurementsurveys.com. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  15. Wu, Margaret L., ed. (2007). ACER ConQuest version 2.0: generalised item response modelling software. Camberwell, Vic: ACER Press. ISBN 9780864314543.
  16. "Notes and tutorials". Australian Council for Educational Research - ACER. Retrieved 2019-02-12.
  17. Rohlfs, Rori V.; Huerta-Sánchez, Emilia; Catalan, Francisca; Castellanos, Edgar; Thu, Ricky; Reyes, Rochelle-Jan; Barragan, Ezequiel Lopez; López, Andrea; Dung, Samantha Kristin (2019-02-01). "Illuminating Women's Hidden Contribution to Historical Theoretical Population Genetics". Genetics. 211 (2): 363–366. doi:10.1534/genetics.118.301277. ISSN 0016-6731. PMC 6366915. PMID 30733376.
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