Montserrat B. Valdivia Medinaceli

Montserrat B. Valdivia Medinaceli earned her Ph.D. in Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methodology and her M.S. in Applied Statistics from Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation focused on improving the valid and fair comparison of results for highly diverse populations in international large-scale assessments. As a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis, she conducted equity-focused research in higher education, drawing on Latine critical frameworks in quantitative methodology. Currently, as an Associate Research Scientist at Curriculum Associates, she leads operational psychometric analyses supporting validity, reliability, and fairness of score use and interpretations for i-Ready Inform and i-Ready Literacy Tasks.

• Joo, S., Valdivia, M., Rutkowski, L., & Svetina Valdivia, D. (2023). Alternatives to weighted item fit statistics for establishing measurement equivalence in many groups. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 10769986231183326.
• Valdivia Medinaceli, M., Rutkowski, L., Svetina Valdivia, D., & Rutkowski, D. (2023). Effects of DIF in MST routing in ILSAs. Large-Scale Assessment in Education Journal, 11(1), 22.
• Paulsen, J., Svetina, D., Feng, Y., & Valdivia, M. (2020). Examining the impact of differential item functioning on classification accuracy in cognitive diagnostic models. Applied Psychological Measurement, 44(4), 267–281.

Academic Presentations

• Valdivia Medinaceli, M., & Rutkowski, L. (2025, April). Psychometric impacts of enhancing cultural representation in math items. Paper presented at the National Council on Measurement in Education Annual Meeting, Denver, CO.
• Valdivia Medinaceli, M., & Rutkowski, L. (2024, April). How can PIRLS take advantage of adaptive testing? Paper presented at the National Council on Measurement in Education Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
• Valdivia Medinaceli, M., Joo, S., Rutkowski, L., & Svetina Valdivia, D. (2023, April). Linearizing the item characteristics curve for detecting differential item functioning. Paper presented at the National Council on Measurement in Education Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.

National Council on Measurement in Education