Jackie is a Registered Psychologist and Professor of School and Clinical Child Psychology at the University of Alberta. She completed her graduate degrees in Psychology at the University of Alberta and postdoctoral fellowship studies in Psychology at Yale University. Her research and teaching is driven by the overarching goal to enhance fairness in testing. In pursuit of this goal, she has increasingly focused her research on investigating the interplay between cognitive and emotional processes underlying learning and academic achievement. For example, she investigates variables that can cognitively or emotionally bias participants’ response processes in testing situations, leading to misrepresentations in performance and weaknesses in validity arguments of test inferences. Overall, she is interested in methods designed to enhance diagnosis of achievement, validation of test inferences, and theoretical understanding of human learning. 

Contact Jackie via jacqueline.leighton@ualberta.ca

Blair is a research scientist at Educational Testing Service. She completed her graduate degrees in Cognitive Psychology and certificate in Cognitive Science at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on understanding students’ emotional and motivational processes during educational activities to design activities that maximize the experience for all students. Her research has focused on the task design of learning and assessment activities as well as the design of adaptive systems that consider both student cognition and motivation. For example, she has explored specific design features of game-based assessments in an effort to understand how to maintain measurement validity while also maximizing student motivation. 

Contact Blair via blehman@ets.org