Drawing on the Lynch School aspiration to “enhance the human condition, to expand the human imagination, and to make the world more just":
The mission of the MESA program is to …
- 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.
In service of this mission …
- 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.