Jonathan Schmidgall is a senior research scientist in the Center for Language Education and Assessment Research in the Research & Development division at ETS. He joined ETS in 2013 after completing his Ph.D. in applied linguistics with a focus on language assessment at UCLA, where he also received a certificate in advanced quantitative methodology from the U.S. Department of Education. His doctoral work used mixed methods to explore issues related to the oral proficiency and comprehensibility of international teaching assistants. At UCLA, he worked as test coordinator for UCLA’s Test of Oral Proficiency and as a graduate student researcher at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, & Student Testing (CRESST).
At ETS, he expanded the scope of his work in language assessment as the research coordinator for the TOEIC® family of assessments, publishing research on language construct definition, the consistency of rater scores, criterion-related validity, standard setting, and argument-based validation. While at ETS, he has also published research on the development and validation of a screener test, a tablet-based learning-oriented assessment, and computer-based academic speaking tasks. He is on the editorial board of Language Testing and Language Assessment Quarterly and was the recipient of the Jacqueline Ross Award for best dissertation in language testing (2014). He has also received an M.A. in cognitive psychology from the University of Colorado and a B.S. in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.