Mission Statement

Drawing on the Lynch School aspiration to “enhance the human condition, to expand the human imagination, and to make the world more just":

Contribute to national and international efforts to solve critical educational and human problems in a diverse global community;
Educate the next generation of scholars and practitioners who will engage in reflective social inquiry;
Foster meaningful scholarly inquiry into both theoretical and applied aspects of social systems;
Advance creative approaches to important measurement, evaluation, and research problems in educational and other social science fields;
Provide students with the necessary theoretical and applied skills and experience to become research and evaluation leaders in their professional fields; and
Prepare students to make original and substantive contributions to the fields of measurement, evaluation, and statistics.

The MESA program is committed to high quality, rigorous, collaborative, and equity-minded research, teaching, and mentoring.
The MESA program trains students in state-of-the-art statistical, research, and evaluation methods.
Students in MESA develop expertise in research methodology, measurement, evaluation, and applied statistics.
MESA faculty members have expertise in classroom and large-scale assessment, measurement and item response theory, factor analysis and structural equation modeling, categorical data analysis, multilevel modeling, generalized linear models, program evaluation, psychometrics, etc.
Graduates of the MESA program find employment in colleges, universities, research centers, testing agencies, school systems, ministries of education and other government agencies, and industry.
Students completing the doctoral/master's degrees are capable of conducting independent research and evaluation, constructing measurement instruments, analyzing and interpreting quantitative and qualitative data, and contributing to the theory of research and evaluation methodology.