Betsy Jane Becker, Ph.D.

Professor, Department Chair
Educational Psychology and Learning Systems
College of Education, Florida State University

Betsy Jane Becker is a professor and coordinator of the program in Measurement and Statistics in the College of Education at Florida State University, where she has been on faculty since Fall 2004. For the previous 21 years she was in the Measurement and Quantitative Methods program at Michigan State University.

Becker earned both B.A. and M.A. degrees in Psychology from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. Becker earned her Ph.D. in Education from The University of Chicago in 1985, where she worked with Larry Hedges and completed a dissertation on combined probability methods for meta-analysis. Her dissertation won the American Educational Research Association's Outstanding Dissertation Award in 1985.

Becker has published widely in the area of meta-analysis and also on psychometric issues in education. Becker's current research involves methods for synthesizing correlation matrices and regression slopes, and she is also involved in two synthesis projects regarding teacher knowledge and teacher qualifications. Becker and her collaborators currently have two grants to support this work, through the National Science Foundation.

She is a founding member and past president of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology, and serves as co-convener of the Methods Training Group for the Campbell Collaboration, an organization whose goals include the promotion of evidence based analysis for policy making in the social sciences. She has also served as a member of the Technical Advisory Group for the "What Works Clearinghouse", an effort to produce research syntheses of studies of educational interventions, supported by a contract from the U.S. Department of Education.

Becker is a member of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Design and Analysis Committee, and has just completed a six-year term as associate editor of the journal Psychological Methods. Becker is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and in the past has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics and the Journal of the American Statistical Association's Applications and Cases Section.