As a Senior Researcher in the Assessment Research and Innovations group at WestEd, Priya Kannan brings her expertise in the area of score reporting that comes from several years of foundational and innovative research in standard setting and score reporting. Her research in this area resulted in peer-reviewed publications, culminating in a chapter on score reporting in the 4th edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education and a chapter on standard setting in the 5th edition of Educational Measurement.
At WestEd, she provides leadership on the score report design and evaluation work for various contracts and provides psychometric support and technical assistance to a number of large-scale multiyear contracts.
Prior to joining WestEd, Kannan was a Research Scientist at ETS for 11 years, where she led foundational research and operational work that informed the score reports for ETS testing programs and large-scale K–12 contracts.
She has served on and chaired several committees for national organizations, such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). She has served on the editorial board for journals, including Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation, and served as an Associate Editor for the ETS Research Report Series from 2019 to 2022.
Kannan co-led a team that received a WestEd Strategic Investment Grant to develop an updated bias review protocol to review assessment tasks and items for relevance, currency, and inclusiveness. The project team will use those tasks and items as the use-case for developing and testing the protocol.
She received her PhD in psychometric research methodology from the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied under the guidance on Dr. Suzanne Lane.