Francis O'Donnell, National Board of Medical Examiners
Francis O’Donnell is a psychometrician at the National Board of Medical Examiners. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Research, Educational Measurement, and Psychometrics in 2019. During her doctoral studies, she contributed to several projects on results reporting for K-12 and licensure assessments, which culminated in a dissertation about how teachers, parents, and students interpret achievement level labels. Francis’s research has been presented at multiple conferences and a book chapter she wrote with Dr. Stephen Sireci about reporting in credentialing and admissions contexts appears in Score Reporting: Research and Applications (Zapata-Rivera, 2018). In her current role, she oversees psychometric activities for medical education and certification examinations and researches topics such as validity, fairness, and innovative approaches to reporting results.