PRINCIPAL AND MANAGING ASSOCIATE

Elizabeth Summers, Ph.D.

Elizabeth Summers, Ph.D., is our Executive Vice President at edCount, LLC. Dr. Summers has extensive experience in assessment validity and alignment evaluation. She has led and assisted numerous local, regional, and national studies of both general and alternate assessment systems, served as coordinator and manager of various projects to improve, design, or redesign assessment systems, and has played a pivotal role in the development and evaluation of alternate assessment systems around the country.

Dr. Summers currently serves as the Project Director for a three-year, multi-state, US Department of Education funded Enhanced Assessment Grant, the Strengthening Claims-based Interpretations and Uses of Local and Large-scale Science Assessment Scores (SCILLSS), where under her direction, four organizational partners and edCount are working together with three state departments of education and a panel of experts to establish foundational resources for new science assessment systems. In addition, Dr. Summers is the Director of the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program – Alternate Assessment project in science and social studies. She oversees the development and documentation activities, including content standard prioritization for assessment, item development, item review for content, bias, and sensitivity, test design for the field test and alternate assessment in Spring of 2017 and 2020, and technical documentation for the alternate assessment in both content areas. Under her direction, edCount has also developed 24 content modules providing curricular information designed to help educators deliver appropriate and challenging content to students with cognitive disabilities.

Dr. Summers served as Process Evaluator for the National Center and State Collaborative General Supervision Enhancement Grant (NCSC-GSEG), a consortium of 19 states which collaborated to design an alternate assessment system aligned with the Common Core State Standards. She also served as Project Director in edCount’s contracts to evaluate the validity of alternate assessments for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities in Hawaii, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Mississippi, and in edCount’s whole-system alignment evaluation of the Georgia Milestones Assessment. Dr. Summers has overseen numerous alignment evaluations for general and alternate assessments, including those for Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Washington DC, and the US Virgin Islands. Within the alignment evaluations for alternate assessments, Dr. Summers provided the overall training for all content and severe disabilities experts, as well as facilitated and monitored evidence collection. She is currently serving as Project Director for the development of alternate assessments in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia.

Prior to joining edCount, Dr. Summers worked as a research coordinator and evaluator for several education grants with the National Alternate Assessment Center. Over the past decade, Dr. Summers’ research products have reflected her commitment to understanding the cognition of special needs students and designing and improving testing and instruction to maximize the achievement potential of this population. She has authored or co-authored more than a dozen research reports, the majority of which have appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals. She has designed several research instruments that are in wide use, including an index of learner characteristics; authored several book chapters, and, since 2003, has presented regularly at national and regional conferences. In 2007, she was awarded TASH’s Alice H. Hayden Emerging Researcher Award for her commitment to improving understanding and service to the population of students with disabilities. Dr. Summers earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and M.S. in Education from the University of Kentucky, and a B.A. in Art and Psychology from Georgetown College.