ITC Granada, the magical setting of the best conference in years | July 2024 | Spain

In the words of cApStAn's founding partner, Steve Dept -

The irrigation system in the olive groves and gardens on the hills surrounding the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, as well as the fountains, pools and baths in the Alhambra itself are a testimony to the engineering skills of Muslims in the Golden Age of Islam: there are no pumps; the entire water system depends entirely on gravity and on applications of the connected vessels theory. The water comes from the Sierra Nevada, six kilometres away. These mathematicians knew what they were doing!

The organisers of the International Test Commission (ITC) Conference (thanks again Jose-Luis Padilla, Luis Manuel Lozano and Isabel Benítez Baena!) privatised the Alhambra for the delegates: we visited the palaces once the other tourists had left: persuasive guides let us in on the grandeur and mystery of the Alhambra.

For me, this was in sync with the Conference itself, a testimony to the vigorous health of research in testing, of the ability of researchers and field practitioners to open up their work for critical scrutiny.

The content on measurement science (in both testing and in survey research) was of the highest level I have seen in years. No recycled presentations, all of it was original work, often still in progress. The presenters were sharing knowledge and experience without trying to convince or to sell. When the audience asked challenging questions, more often than not I saw presenters react along the lines of “hey! that’s a good approach! I didn’t think of that, I need to look into that.”

There were 430 delegates from over 40 countries (for example, there were 13 attendees from Indonesia!), and the collegial spirit was warm and stimulating.

As gold sponsors, cApStAn Linguistic Quality Control had a booth where my colleagues Devasmita Ghosh and Anubhav Nathani answered dozens of questions about our approach to maximising cross-language, cross-cultural and cross-regional comparability of assessment instruments and questionnaires. We made many new friends, of course, and returned home energised from cross-pollination. And we reconnected with old friends, too.

I attended all the sessions I could, and was particularly impressed with the strong focus on test use and the consequences of test use, which were central topics in both Stephen Sireci‘s presidential address and Jennifer Randall‘s provocative keynote.

I met other researchers who confessed that they completely ignored test consequences for many years, and are only now beginning to think of the inequity embedded in standardised tests. Jennifer Randall debunked the myth of meritocracy with some of the most powerful arguments I have heard to date.

Panel sessions, symposia, short courses, you name it, I was highly impressed with the capacity of the speakers to condense months, if not years, of research into 10-15 minute presentations that made perfect sense and that, in many cases, were eye-openers with Aha moments.

Personally, I had the honour to participate in a symposium on “Current Trends and Best Practices in Cross-Lingual Assessment” with Louise Badham (International Baccalaureate and Oxford), Maria Elena Oliveri (Purdue University), Stephen Sireci (UMass Amherst) and Guillermo Solano-Flores (Stanford) as discussant.

It was humbling to share the room with experts of this calibre, and I particularly liked the discussant’s invitation to consider different translation models for different cultural contexts. I had shared 25 years of trial and error in test translation and adaptation, and it was great to leave the room with new research questions.

This conference will leave a deep impression on me — and I am honoured to serve on the ITC Council under the presidency of Kadriye Ercikan.