André A. Rupp is a faculty member in the Department of Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation (EDMS) at the University of Maryland where the workshop is being held. Over the years, he has worked in different research positions in Canada, Germany, and the United States. Before coming to EDMS, he worked at the national research institute for standards-based assessment in Germany, which gave him a comprehensive understanding of how conflicting demands of assessment designers, curriculum experts, measurement specialists, and policy-makers need to be negotiated for successful large-scale assessment projects. Thus, he brings a unique perspective to the workshop that relates to both the methodological and the applied spectrum of large-scale assessment work.

His research interests center on investigating how the theoretical potential of Diagnostic Classification Models (DCMs) can be best realized in interdisciplinary practice, especially in educational assessment. His mission is to aid practitioners in dissecting and translating the often relatively complex landscape of the educational measurement literature into meaningful guidelines for best practice. He wants to specifically facilitate communication between experts with different backgrounds and belief-systems within interdisciplinary projects that use multidimensional measurement models generally and DCMs specifically. Most recently, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he has started to explore how such models can be used to analyze complex data arising out of simulation-based epistemic games to provide feedback that supports learning in such environments.