Stephen N. Elliott

Professor of Special Education and Dunn Family Chair in Educational and Psychological Assessment; Director, Learning Sciences Institute; Director, Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Psychology

Ph.D., Arizona State University, 1980

Research Areas

Assessment of children’s social skills and academic competence, development and validation of testing accommodations and alternate assessments for evaluating the academic performance of students with disabilities and the design and evaluation of tests and assessments of human performance.

Short Biography

Steve is an educational psychologist with interests in children’s academic and social learning and the measurement of this learning. Prior to coming to Vanderbilt in 2004 as the Dunn Family Professor of Educational and Psychological Assessment, Steve was on faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was the associate director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and a faculty member of UW’s top-ranked School Psychology program.

He currently co-directs three USDE research grants concerning the design and validation of alternate assessments for students with disabilities and a fourth USDE project to validate the Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED). Steve teaches courses on educational psychology history and research and an advanced assessment course in Special Education.

Steve has been a productive scholar, authoring more than 130 journal articles, 20 books, 40 book chapters and five widely used behavior-rating scales. His scholarly and professional contributions have been recognized by his colleagues in psychology as evidenced by being the 1984 recipient of the Lightner Witmer Award from Division 16 within the American Psychological Association, by being elected to Fellow status in four APA divisions, being appointed editor of School Psychology Review (1984-1990) for two terms and most recently by being invited to be an AERA Fellow.

Steve frequently consults with educators on the assessment and instruction of K-12 students and served on the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Education Goals 2000 and Students with Disabilities during 1995-1997. He recently completed multi-year appointments on the U.S. Department of Education's technical advisory panels for the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the National Alternate Assessment Study.

In addition to his faculty position in Special Education, Steve serves as Director of the Peabody Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Psychology (IPEP), a relatively new inter-departmental doctoral program focusing on learning and measurement research. And in May 2008, Steve was appointed the Director of the Learning Sciences Institute (LSI), a Vanderbilt trans-institutional center that supports the development and management of the externally funded research projects of more than 50 Vanderbilt faculty.

Learn More about Stephen N. Elliott:

Projects | Courses Taught | Selected Publications
Awards | CV | Media Mentions

Courses Taught

Educational and psychological assessment; interventions for at-risk children and youth.

Areas of Expertise

Special Education

Assessment

Psychology and Human Development

Related Links

• Interdisciplinary Program in Education Psychology (IPEP)
• Learning Sciences Institute

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