Advanced Psychometrics Methods Workshop 2010

The overall mission of the “Advanced Psychometric Methods for Cognitive Aging Research” conference series is to promote the use of state of the art psychometric and related data analytic methods in cognitive aging research. Specific objectives are:

1) expose developing and established researchers in cognitive aging to modern psychometric techniques

2) expose experts in psychometric theory and methods to the practical and theoretical concerns of cognitive aging research

3) encourage collaborative research and production of manuscripts based on the interactions of researchers, psychometricians, and statisticians during these conferences.

Conference participants will have diverse backgrounds in terms of level of training, experience, areas of expertise, gender and ethnicity. Each conference will be organized around an existing dataset from studies that have been highly influential in cognitive aging research. Each meeting will include didactic training on advanced psychometric and statistical methods relevant to these studies, and a major part of the program will be devoted to data analyses that address specific scientific hypotheses relevant to the parent studies. Workgroups will continue to interact after the conference to follow these analyses to completion of scientific manuscripts.

Didactic training will address basics of item response theory, latent variable modeling, and other data analytic methods relevant to the studies and data sets being used. More in depth mentored experience in using these methods will be provided during the workgroups. Diversity in substantive and methodological expertise of participants will be emphasized so that the conference promotes learning for all participants and establishes an informal network to enhance research on cognitive changes associated with aging.