Professional Biography
Dr. Paul McDermott is a Professor in the Human Development and Quantitative Methods Division at Penn GSE. A psychometrician and quantitative psychologist, he previously served as director of Clinical and Industrial Measurement for The Psychological Corporation and Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry (Penn School of Medicine). He holds a Diplomate (A.B.A.P.) from the American Academy of Assessment Psychology and is a licensed psychologist and certified school psychologist.
Dr. McDermott specializes in measurement theory, scale development, and multilevel and latent variable modeling. He develops standardized measures of school behavioral adjustment, classroom learning behaviors, neighborhood effects, addiction severity, and cognitive growth. Recent nationally standardized measures include the Adjustment Scales for Early Transition in Schooling, the Adjustment Scales for Children and Adolescents, the Learning Behaviors Scale, the Preschool Learning Behaviors Scale, and the Learning-To-Learn Scales. These instruments are translated into many European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and South American languages and are applied worldwide. Dr. McDermott co-authored the Adjustment Scales for Preschool Intervention, which is designed for Head Start populations, and the Home Edition of the Adjustment Scales for Children and Adolescents, which is applied in the Caribbean for parental assessments of youth psychopathology.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. McDermott co-directs with Dr. Michael Rovine (Penn GSE) several large-scale measurement development programs. They apply nationally representative data from the Adjustment Scales for Early Transition in Schooling to discover types of school maladjustment and to trace developmental patterns for pre-K through first grade. This program is identifying behavioral change trajectories that are emblematic of long-term academic proficiency and social resilience. A second program is longitudinally equating assessments from the Head Start Preschool Learning Behaviors Scale with those from the elementary school Learning Behaviors Scale. This work is revealing growth patterns in stylistic classroom learning behavior as related to later attendance, achievement, and adjustment problems. Additionally, he heads research that examines assessor bias in high-stakes psychological assessment for special education classification.
Dr. McDermott is co-principal investigator for a large-scale Spanish/English translation and equating study assessing classroom behavioral disorders via the Adjustment Scales for Preschool Intervention. This work applies item response theory (IRT) and other advanced psychometric procedures to develop linguistically and culturally appropriate measures with bilingual preschool teachers and diverse Latino populations in the southeastern U.S.
Dr. McDermott also co-supervises a Penn/Baylor/U.C.L.A.–Berkeley research group that is scaling and validating several measures of classroom learning behavior as well as school and home assessments of youth social-emotional adjustment in Trinidad and Tobago. These measures are nationally standardized across the islands. Dr. McDermott also directed development of the Learning Express, an individually administered adaptive performance battery for measuring preschool learning growth over brief intervals as grounded in IRT, and the Learning-to-Learn Scales to assess differential learning styles related to strategic planning in learning, persistence, appropriate risk-taking, attentiveness, and interpersonal responsiveness in learning situations.