Contacts
For any inquiries or questions regarding WARNS, please send an email to the following address: WARNS@wsu.edu.
Paul Strand, Ph.D.
Paul S. Strand’s research is concerned with the social skills development and school readiness of children and youth from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Also of concern to him are verbal processes that emerge in cultural context and guide behavior, such as emotional knowledge and social values. His applied efforts aim to develop and improve the WARNS as a model assessment-intervention framework for use in school and juvenile court settings. Paul also is leading the development of the middle school and elementary school versions of the WARNS instrument.
Brian French, Ph.D.
Brian French’s research focuses on educational and psychological measurement issues. With regard to WARNS, Brian focuses on the technical aspects and operational issues of the assessment relating to score use for decisions about individuals. This work ties directly to his area of research. The first area concerns the application of psychometric methods to gather score validity evidence for instruments. The second area, informed by the first, is the use of methodological studies to evaluate and improve methods in terms of efficiency and accuracy used to gather test score validity evidence. A sample of topics of interest include: Measurement Invariance, Structural Equation Modeling, Item Response Theory, Classical Test Theory, Factor Analysis, Monte Carlo studies.
Bruce Austin, MS, MA
Bruce Austin holds a master’s in educational psychology, as well as in statistics. He is a Research Associate Professor working with the university’s Learning and Performance Research Center. Bruce’s research focuses on statistical methods, specifically in the areas of psychometrics and measurement invariance. His work includes developing statistical methods for detecting and adjusting data for various sources of construct irrelevant variance. As part of the WARNS team, Bruce is helping implement the assessment in high schools in the state of Washington as well as nationally. He is looking forward to helping with the development of future WARNS assessment instruments for younger age-groups.
Thao Vo, MA
Thao Vo holds a master’s in Educational Psychology. One of her research areas is the application of a new generation of item bias analysis to the WARNS in an ecological framework to understand why bias occurs using sociological, community, and contextual variables as possible explanations, above ethnicity. Ms. Vo is also in charge of training for new WARNS subscribers and also assists with marketing efforts for the assessment platform.