Rate My Professor Esther Ulitzsch

Esther Ulitzsch is a Professor at the Centre for Educational Measurement (CEMO), Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo, a position she joined in January 2024. She also serves as an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Research in Applied Measurement and Evaluation at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Prior to this, Ulitzsch worked as a Research Associate in the Department for Educational Measurement and Data Science at the IPN–Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education in Kiel, Germany. She earned her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her research centers on psychometric model development for identifying aberrant response behavior, such as careless and insufficient effort responding, and improving understanding of item omissions. Ulitzsch specializes in Bayesian latent variable models, with a focus on estimation techniques for small-sample conditions. Additionally, she develops tools to analyze clickstream and action sequence data, facilitating investigations of student behavior in simulated environments.

In 2024, Ulitzsch received the Jason Millman Promising Measurement Scholar Award from the National Council on Measurement in Education for her cutting-edge, innovative work addressing methodological and real-life measurement issues. Her contributions to psychometrics are evidenced by highly cited publications, including 'A hierarchical latent response model for inferences about examinee engagement in terms of guessing and item-level non-response' (2020, British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology), 'A response-time-based latent response mixture model for identifying and modeling careless and insufficient effort responding in survey data' (2022, Psychometrika), 'Using sequence mining techniques for understanding incorrect behavioral patterns on interactive tasks' (2022, Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics), 'An explanatory mixture IRT model for careless and insufficient effort responding in self-report measures' (2022, British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology), and 'Dynamic changes in metacognitive mechanisms and symptoms during the attention training technique: Insights from ecological momentary assessment' (2026, Journal of Anxiety Disorders). These works advance detection of response engagement and enhance measurement accuracy in educational assessments and surveys. Ulitzsch serves as Head of Studies at CEMO.