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Courtney Donovan, PhD, assistant professor in the School of Education & Human Development at CU Denver, has received the Georg William Rasch Early Career Publication Award, a national honor recognizing outstanding research in educational measurement.

At its core, Donovan’s work focuses on an important question: How do we measure complex thinking in ways that are accurate, meaningful, and useful for educators?

The award recognizes a publication she co-authored with Heather Johnson, PhD, professor of mathematics education, that developed a new tool to measure how students reason about graphs in dynamic situations. In math classrooms, students are often asked to interpret graphs that represent changing quantities. Donovan’s research helps identify the different levels of reasoning students use when making sense of those changes.

While scholars have long believed that graph reasoning develops in stages, Donovan and her colleagues provided the first quantitative evidence that those stages form a measurable hierarchy. Using a statistical framework known as Rasch measurement, they demonstrated that increasingly sophisticated forms of reasoning can be placed along a continuum. That matters because it strengthens both theory and practice, giving researchers and educators a clearer picture of how students’ thinking develops.

“Rasch is my favorite statistical modeling to use in research and to teach,” Donovan said. “I fell in love with this technique in my doctoral program, so it’s such an honor to receive an award for something so close to my heart.” She described being recognized by the Rasch community as “both humbling and inspiring.”

Donovan’s broader scholarship centers on psychometrics, the science of building tools that measure things we cannot directly observe, such as ability, reasoning, or abstract thinking. What she appreciates most about Rasch measurement is that it is both a theory and a model. “The creators theorized what should make a measure ‘good’ and created mathematical modeling that would demonstrate that,” she explained. “Even better is that it is perfect for practical, applied tools, so it’s ideal for working with practitioners and bridging the research-to-practice gap we see in education and community settings.”

That bridge between research and practice is central to her work at CU Denver. In the Research and Evaluation Methods program, Donovan recently taught Advanced Measurement, where she shared the full arc of the award-winning study with students. A professor at Miami University has since reached out to say he plans to use the article as an example in his own Rasch measurement course.

Donovan credits the School of Education & Human Development and the Research and Evaluation Methods (REM) program for supporting the integration of her teaching and research. She points to the collaborative culture within the program as essential to her work. “The REM program has always been supportive of my research interests and combining those with my teaching,” she said. “This wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for faculty colleagues with such cool research who are willing to collaborate, take chances, and question status quo both in their content but also in their methodologies.” Through that support, Donovan continues to advance measurement research while preparing future scholars to design tools that are both rigorous and relevant.