Benjamin Drake Wright (March 30, 1926 – October 25, 2015) was an American psychometrician. He is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of Georg Rasch's measurement principles and models.Rasch, G. (1988/1972, Summer). Review of the cooperation of Professor B. D. Wright, University of Chicago, and Professor G. Rasch, University of Copenhagen; letter of June 18, 1972. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 2(2), 19 . In the wake of what Rasch referred to as Wright's “almost unbelievable activity in this field” in the period from 1960 to 1972, Rasch's ideas entered the mainstream in high-stakes testing, professional certification and licensure examinations, and in research employing tests, and surveys and assessments across a range of fields. Wright's seminal contributions to measurement continued until 2001, and included articulation of philosophical principles, production of practical results and applications, software development, development of estimation methods and model fit statistics, vigorous support for students and colleagues, and the founding of professional societies and new publications.
Biography Wright was born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, on March 30, 1926. He retired in October, 2001.
Early life and education (1926–1960) Wright's experiences at age seven with mental testing sparked his lifelong interest in tests and test questions. Wright's mother, Dorothy Wright (née Wadhams, 1902–1995), was a lifelong advocate of progressive education.A descendant of Mayflower era Calvinists, Wright’s ancestor, the Reverend Noah Wadhams (1726–1806) was a Congregationalist minister to the pioneer Susquehanna Company settlement of what is now Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania during the era of the Pennamite-Yankee War and the Battle of Wyoming (Wadhams, H. W. S. (1913). Wadhams genealogy: Preceded by a sketch of the Wadham family in England. New York: Frank Allaben Genealogical Co., p. 50). Noah was a brother-in-law to the Reverend Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), a leading spokesperson for New Divinity theology during the First Great Awakening and whose writings formed the theological basis of the Second Great Awakening. Hopkins was an early abolitionist and, like his mentor Jonathan Edwards, a staunch advocate for a quality education for everyone, including indigenous Americans, slaves, former slaves, and women. In the summer of 1933, his mother sent him to Housatonic Camp in Canaan, Connecticut, where he was individually given a battery of tests over the course of that summer. The tests were administered by teachers and staff from the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, New York City. Wright subsequently attended Little Red over the course of grades 2 and 4 to 7. Thus, Wright's education was shaped by early advocates of integrating scientific assessment into the classroom, including Elisabeth Irwin and Bank Street College founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell.Antler, J. (1982). Progressive education and the scientific study of the child: An analysis of the Bureau of Educational Experiments , 1916–1930. Teachers College Record, 83 (4), 559–591. At the time, the Little Red course of study was based on curricula outlined in Mitchell's Here and Now Story Book and Young Geographers.Mitchell, L. S. (1921). Here and Now Story Book. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company; Mitchell, L. S. (1934). Young Geographers: How they explore the world & how they map the world. New York: Bank Street College; de Lima, A. (1942). The Little Red School House. New York: The Macmillan Company; O'Han, N. (2009). The little school that could: Tough economic times created the rationale for one school [Electronic Version]. Independent School, 68. Retrieved July 1, 2009.
From 1940 to 1944, Wright attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. In June 1944, at age 18, Wright enlisted in the U.S. Navy. As the result of his score on the Army Navy College Qualifying Test, Wright was assigned to the V-12 Navy College Training Program and to fulfill his military duty at Cornell University studying physics.Ironically, the AMNCQT was administered by Henry Chauncey. This was the precursor for Educational Testing Service's administration of the SAT. Chauncey would co-found the Educational Testing Service shortly after the war (Lemann, N. . The big test: The secret history of the American meritocracy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux., pp.54–57). The Cornell physics faculty included Richard Feynman who, in parallel with John von Neumann, had begun adapting an IBM business punch card machine to solve the Los Alamos physicists’ linear equations more quickly.Kelly, C. C., & Gray, C. (2004). From the birth of scientific computing to today's PCs via the Manhattan Project [Electronic Version]. Retrieved 4/20/2007 This work led to the modern computer. As well as graduating with Honors from the physics program within three years, Wright's Cornell transcript shows he was awarded 87 additional credit hours “for work in the School of Electrical Engineering…under the V-12 program,” indicating the extent of Wright's work with early computer prototypes for the US military.
In the summer of 1947, after graduating from Cornell and receiving an honorable discharge from the US Navy, Wright interned at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate Charles H. Townes. Townes had begun a series of pioneering studies in microwave spectroscopy,Townes, C. H. (1999). How the laser happened: Adventures of a scientist. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 43–46). but had no budget for a laboratory assistant. Wright's contributions as an intern led to his first scientific publication, completed before he entered graduate school.Townes, C. H., Merritt, F. R., & Wright, B. D. (1948). The pure rotational spectrum of ICL. Physical Review, 73, 1334–1337.
In the fall of 1947, Wright enrolled as a graduate student in the University of Chicago Physics Department. In January 1948, he was hired as a research assistant to Nobel Laureate Robert S. Mulliken (1896–1986) at the university's Laboratory of Molecular Structure and Spectra. John R. Platt, known for his work on strong inference, was his supervisor and Clemens C. J. Roothaan was his lab partner. Mulliken and his colleagues made pioneering contributions to molecular orbital physics modeling electron waveforms.Roothaan, C. C. J. (1951). New developments in molecular orbital theory. Reviews of Modern Physics, 23(2), 69–89.
Wright continued work as a research assistant with Mulliken and his colleagues until 1951.Wright, B. D. (1988). George Rasch and measurement. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 2(3), 25–32. However, Wright's interests extended beyond the physics laboratory. He directed a group theater for young adults at the Gads Hill Center in the Pilsen neighborhood of the Lower West Side, Chicago and he took classes from psychologist Carl Rogers and sociologist Lloyd Warner (with whom he would later work at Social Research Inc.). Wright also attended several lectures given by Louis Thurstone, a pioneer in psychological measurement and psychometrics.
Believing that understanding how children learn was even more important than understanding molecular structure, in late spring of 1948 Wright made a dramatic shift of focus. He left a major in physics to enroll in the Committee on Human Development. The committee had been organized in 1940 by then Education Department Chair Ralph W. Tyler to promote cross disciplinary research,Lagemann, E. C. (2002). An elusive science: The troubling history of education research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 150ff. which appealed to the young Wright. In 1951, Wright became a counselor at the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago, then directed by Bruno Bettelheim who was also faculty on the Committee on Human Development.
During this period, Wright also earned a Certificate in Psychoanalytic Childcare from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis (1954), a Doctorate in Philosophy of Human Development from the University of Chicago (1957), and an Illinois State license to practice clinical psychology (1959, 1964). Wright and Bettelheim co-authored two papers.Bettelheim, B., & Wright, B. D. (1955, October). Staff development in a treatment institution. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, XXV(4), 705–19.Wright, B. D., & Bettelheim, B. (1957, March). Professional identity and personal rewards in teaching. The Elementary School Journal, LVII, 297–307.
In the mid-1950s, Wright's neighbor in Chicago was the statistician Leonard Jimmie Savage. They became close friends. Daily discussions with Savage inspired Wright's interest in statistics, and in January 1957, Wright began teaching statistics and psychology at the University of Chicago Departments of Education and Psychology. Almost immediately Wright ran into trouble with his departmental colleagues for criticizing the scientific basis of education statistics texts. He would likely have lost his position had not Savage intervened on his behalf.Linacre, J. M. (1998). Ben Wright: The measure of the man. Popular Measurement, Spring, 23–25.
In 1959, the University of Chicago received a gift of a UNIVAC I (1 kilobyte) vacuum tube computer, and, in 1962, the university received a $2.5 million IBM 7090 main frame computer. The latter took up the entire basement of the Institute for Computer Research at 5640 S. Ellis, Chicago. A computer was a tool then unfamiliar to social scientists. Wright, however, especially in his work with Mulliken and Roothaan, had experience writing computer programs to glean information from empirical data. He seized the opportunity to write a program to perform factor analysis and regression on the new computer. Wright may then have written and employed the first computer program for factor analysis in the social sciences.Lewis, R. (1962, October 27). U. of C. 'brain' makes debut, spurts answers with electronic ease. Chicago Tribune
In 1960, Savage invited Georg Rasch to give a series of 24 lectures on his "models for measurement" at the University of Chicago.Andrich, D. (1995). Rasch and Wright: The early years (transcript of a 1981 interview with Ben Wright). In J. M. Linacre (Ed.), Rasch Measurement Transactions, Part 1 (pp. 1–4) . Chicago, Illinois: MESA Press. The Rasch model for constructing measures of ability and difficulty on the same scale subsequently became the focus of Wright's career.
Contributions to measurement (1960–2001) Wright was dissatisfied with the results of the factor analysis work he'd been doing in the late 1950s on semantic differential data from Chicago area firms' marketing projects. He found the instability of the factors across data sets disconcerting, especially since the lack of a stochastic frame of reference meant there were no standard errors for the factor loadings. Listening to Rasch's lectures in 1960, Wright saw there was another way leading to results that were "stable in terms that a physicist would accept." Extending Rasch's own analogies from James Clerk Maxwell's analysis of mass, force, and acceleration,Rasch, G. (1960). Probabilistic models for some intelligence and attainment tests (reprint, with Foreword and Afterword by B. D. Wright, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Copenhagen, Denmark: Danmarks Paedogogiske Institut. Wright subsequently used an everyday yardstick in his teaching to convey measurement concepts simply and clearly.