Margaret Wu is an Australian statistician and psychometrician who specialises in educational measurement. She is an honorary professor at the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public university, public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state ...

Early life

Wu studied

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

at the

and graduated in 1972. She worked at

Monash University Monash University () is a public university, public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria (state), Victoria, Australia. Named after World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the ...

as a research assistant from 1973 to 1975, where she taught herself to program. She worked with Watterson on the Watterson estimator, a means to determine the

genetic diversity Genetic diversity is the total number of genetic characteristics in the genetic makeup of a species. It ranges widely, from the number of species to differences within species, and can be correlated to the span of survival for a species. It is d ...

of a population.

Research and career

Wu joined

CSIRO The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government agency that is responsible for scientific research and its commercial and industrial applications. CSIRO works with leading organisations arou ...

as a technical officer in 1977. She earned a graduate diploma in computer studies from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1985. Wu became a high school teacher at Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar School, teaching Chinese and mathematics. She was appointed as a senior research fellow in the Australian Council of Educational Research Development (ACER) in 1992, where she was deputy director of

Programme for International Student Assessment The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations intended to evaluate educational systems by measuring 15-year ...

(PISA). Working with ACER and the

, Wu completed her

master's A master's degree (from Latin ) is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional prac ...

, which was awarded the Freda Cohen Award for the Best Masters Thesis in Education. Wu remained at the

for her PhD, modelling student assessment data with underlying abilities modelled as

latent variable In statistics, latent variables (from Latin: present participle of ) are variables that can only be inferred indirectly through a mathematical model from other observable variables that can be directly observed or measured. Such '' latent va ...

s. She was appointed

associate professor Associate professor is an academic title with two principal meanings: in the North American system and that of the ''Commonwealth system''. In the ''North American system'', used in the United States and many other countries, it is a position ...

at the

in 2008. She studied whether collaborative teams of teachers using evidence-based decisions influenced student achievement. She was made a professor at

Victoria University, Melbourne Victoria University (VU or Vic Uni) is an Australian public university, public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria. It is a dual-sector university, providing courses in both higher education and technical and further education (TAFE) ...

in 2012. Wu is sceptical about the importance of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy ( NAPLAN) and

PISA Pisa ( ; ) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) in Tuscany, Central Italy, straddling the Arno just before it empties into the Ligurian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa. Although Pisa is known worldwide for the Leaning Tow ...

results due to

measurement error Observational error (or measurement error) is the difference between a measured value of a quantity and its unknown true value.Dodge, Y. (2003) ''The Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms'', OUP. Such errors are inherent in the measurement pr ...

s acquired during collection of data. She is also concerned about the

inference Inferences are steps in logical reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word '' infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinct ...

s that can be drawn from assessment data, such as using student performance to evaluate teacher performance. She believes that whilst teachers contribute to education, other factors are likely to be more important. After the data was published on the website ''My School'', Wu began to speak up about the misuse of standardised testing. Her efforts resulted into an enquiry into the effectiveness of NAPLAN. Her findings were confirmed in 2018, when Les Perelman and Walt Haney reported that NAPLAN results of one million students should "be discarded". In 1995, Wu began to concentrate on the development of

Item Response Theory In psychometrics, item response theory (IRT, also known as latent trait theory, strong true score theory, or modern mental test theory) is a paradigm for the design, analysis, and scoring of Test (student assessment), tests, questionnaires, and sim ...

. She developed two item response software programs that analyse

and TIMSS data; ''ACER ConQuest'' (1998) and the R-package ''TAM'' (2010). Wu's contributions to the Watterson estimator were uncovered by a team of undergraduate students led by Emilia Huerta-Sánchez (

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

) and Rori Rohlfs (

San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a Public university, public research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It was established in 1899 as the San Francisco State Normal School and is ...

). The students searched every issue of Theoretical Population Biology published between 1970 and 1990. She was one of several "acknowledged programmers", who were disproportionately women, who contributed significantly to highly cited manuscripts.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wu, Margaret Australian statisticians Monash University alumni Academic staff of the University of Melbourne Educational researchers Australian women statisticians 1950 births Living people