Laura Hamilton

Laura Hamilton is a senior associate at the Center for Assessment, where she collaborates with states, districts, and nonprofit organizations on the design and implementation of assessment policies and practices. She is especially interested in supporting the development and implementation of both large-scale and classroom assessment systems that measure students’ college, career, and civic readiness. She is co-editing a book on assessing civic learning opportunities and outcomes, and she’s developing guidance for state education agencies to incorporate civic learning measures into their assessment and accountability systems.

Before joining the Center for Assessment, Hamilton was a senior director at American Institutes for Research, where she led the Center on Advancing Measurement and Assessment. She has also served as associate vice president in the Research and Measurement Sciences area at ETS, distinguished chair in learning and assessment at RAND, and co-director of RAND’s nationally representative educator survey panels. She has led several large, mixed-method research and evaluation projects and has received research funding from federal and state agencies, philanthropic foundations, and other nonprofit entities.

Hamilton has served on numerous expert committees and panels including the Joint Committee to develop the AERA/APA/NCME Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee on developing indicators of educational equity, and technical advisory committees for state assessment programs. She’s also held editorial roles with several journals.

Hamilton is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association and received the Joseph A. Zins Distinguished Scholar Award from CASEL. She received a Ph.D. in educational psychology and an M.S. in statistics from Stanford University.