Unlearned Lessons

W. James Popham has spent the bulk of his educational career as a teacher. His first teaching assignment was in a small high school in eastern Oregon, where he taught English and social studies while serving as yearbook advisor, class sponsor, and unpaid tennis coach. That recompense meshed ideally with the quality of his coaching.

Most of Dr. Popham’s teaching career took place at UCLA, where, for nearly thirty years, he taught courses in instructional methods for prospective teachers and courses in evaluation and measurement for graduate students. At UCLA he won several distinguished teaching awards and, in January 2000, he was recognized by UCLA Today as one of UCLA’s top twenty professors of the twentieth century. (He notes that the twentieth century was a full-length century, unlike the current abbreviated one.) In 1992, Dr. Popham took early retirement from UCLA upon learning that emeritus professors received free parking.

Because at UCLA he was acutely aware of the perishability of professors who failed to publish, Dr. Popham spent his nonteaching hours affixing words to paper. The result: 30 books, 200 journal articles, 50 research reports, and 175 papers presented before research societies. Although not noted in his official vita, while at UCLA he also authored 1,426 grocery lists.

Dr. Popham’s most recent books are Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know (5th ed., 2008) and Assessment for Educational Leaders (2006); The Truth about Testing: An Educator’s Call to Action (2001) and Test Better, Teach Better: The Instructional Role of Assessment (2003); America’s “Failing” Schools: How Parents and Teachers Can Cope with No Child Left Behind (2005) and Mastering Assessment: A Self-Service System for Educators (2006). He encourages purchase of these books because he regards receiving their semiannual royalties as psychologically reassuring.

In 1978, Dr. Popham was elected to the presidency of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He was also the founding editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a quarterly journal published by AERA. He has attended each year’s AERA meeting since his first in 1958. He is inordinately compulsive.

In 1968, Dr. Popham established the Institutional Objectives Exchange, which then was known as IOX Assessment Associates, an R&D group that formerly created statewide student achievement tests for a dozen states. He has personally passed all of those tests, largely because of his unlimited access to the tests’ answer keys.

In 2002, the National Council on Measurement in Education presented Dr. Popham with its Award for Career Contributions to Educational Measurement. In 2006 he was awarded a Certificate of Recognition by the National Association of Test Directors. His complete forty-two-page, single-spaced vita can be requested. It is really dull reading.