People

Center Director

‌Madhabi ChatterjiDr. Madhabi Chatterji

Madhabi Chatterji, Ph.D., M.Ed., BSc (Hons.) is Professor of Measurement, Evaluation, and Education and the founding director of the Assessment and Evaluation Research Initiative (AERI) at Columbia University’s Teachers College (TC), a center dedicated to promoting meaningful use of assessment and evaluation information to improve the quality of practices and policies, across disciplines and internationally (www.tc.edu/aeri ).

Professor Chatterji’s long-standing research interests are in assessment and evaluation in education. Since 2008, she has extended these lines of inquiry to health, psychology, and other applied fields with a forthcoming book: Designing Assessments for Multidisciplinary Constructs and Applications: A User-centered Methodology (Guilford, in preparation). Her 50+ refereed journal articles and edited works have been published in many top tier academic journals, including the Educational Researcher, Review of Educational Research, Journal of Educational Psychology, Educational and Psychological Measurement, American Journal of Evaluation, Journal of Learning Disabilities, and Health Education & Behavior.  Her first book, Designing and Using Tools for Educational Assessment (2003, Allyn & Bacon/Pearson), is  popular among students and first presented a Process Model to guide instrument design, validation and use. Professor Chatterji teaches graduate level courses in measurement-evaluation methods at TC, and has served as major advisor or examiner on 60+ doctoral dissertation committees over time.

A public intellectual, she has spoken out on the consequences of misuses of tests and test-based information through news outlets,  op-eds  and blogs. She co-led the blog in Education Week (2014: Assessing the Assessments: K-12 Measurement and Accountability in the 21st Centuryhttp://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/assessing_the_assessments  ). She is a Fellow at the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) based at the University of Colorado, Boulder (2006-present), a forum through which she continues her assessment policy work.

Dr. Chatterji was the Co-editor of Quality Assurance in Education, an international peer-reviewed journal in educational evaluation (2015-2018).  Her past service also includes memberships on numerous national and international advisory panels and journal review boards, including the editorial boards of Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, and the Educational Researcher, the flagship journals of the National Council on Measurement on Education and the American Educational Research Association. She served as a member of an expert consensus committee on evidence frameworks for decision-making in obesity prevention convened by the Institute of Medicine, now the National Academy of Medicine (2008-10). Currently, she is on the Faculty Steering Committee of the Columbia Global Centers-Mumbai.

Prior to joining TC in 2001, Dr. Chatterji was Assistant Professor in the Department of Measurement and Research at the College of Education, University of South Florida (USF, 1996-2000), and Supervisor, Research and Evaluation Services at the District School Board of Pasco County in Florida (1988-1995). She received her Ph.D. from USF in 1990, before which she was a secondary school teacher of English and Science in India.

Dr. Chatterji emigrated to the U.S. as a doctoral student in 1985, with her then-young daughters, Ruma and Raka. They are all settled permanently in the U.S. now.

To learn more about Professor Chatterji’s specific  research interests, current roles, sponsored research activities and awards/recognitions, please see her CV :

Back to skip to quick links