Benjamin Drake Wright

Benjamin Drake Wright (March 30, 1926 – October 25, 2015) was an American psychometrician. He is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of Georg Rasch's measurement principles and models. In the wake of what Rasch referred to as Wright's “almost unbelievable activity in this field” in the period from 1960 to 1972, Rasch's ideas entered the mainstream in high-stakes testing, professional certification and licensure examinations, and in research employing tests, and surveys and assessments across a range of fields. Wright's seminal contributions to measurement continued until 2001, and included articulation of philosophical principles, production of practical results and applications, software development, development of estimation methods and model fit statistics, vigorous support for students and colleagues, and the founding of professional societies and new publications.

Wright was born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, on March 30, 1926. He retired in October, 2001.

Wright's experiences at age seven with mental testing sparked his lifelong interest in tests and test questions. Wright's mother, Dorothy Wright (née Wadhams, 1902–1995), was a lifelong advocate of progressive education. In the summer of 1933, his mother sent him to Housatonic Camp in Canaan, Connecticut, where he was individually given a battery of tests over the course of that summer. The tests were administered by teachers and staff from the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, New York City. Wright subsequently attended Little Red over the course of grades 2 and 4 to 7. Thus, Wright's education was shaped by early advocates of integrating scientific assessment into the classroom, including Elisabeth Irwin and Bank Street College founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell. At the time, the Little Red course of study was based on curricula outlined in Mitchell's Here and Now Story Book and Young Geographers.

From 1940 to 1944, Wright attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. In June 1944, at age 18, Wright enlisted in the U.S. Navy. As the result of his score on the Army Navy College Qualifying Test, Wright was assigned to the V-12 Navy College Training Program and to fulfill his military duty at Cornell University studying physics. The Cornell physics faculty included Richard Feynman who, in parallel with John von Neumann, had begun adapting an IBM business punch card machine to solve the Los Alamos physicists’ linear equations more quickly. This work led to the modern computer. As well as graduating with Honors from the physics program within three years, Wright's Cornell transcript shows he was awarded 87 additional credit hours “for work in the School of Electrical Engineering…under the V-12 program,” indicating the extent of Wright's work with early computer prototypes for the US military.

In the summer of 1947, after graduating from Cornell and receiving an honorable discharge from the US Navy, Wright interned at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate Charles H. Townes. Townes had begun a series of pioneering studies in microwave spectroscopy, but had no budget for a laboratory assistant. Wright's contributions as an intern led to his first scientific publication, completed before he entered graduate school.

In the fall of 1947, Wright enrolled as a graduate student in the University of Chicago Physics Department. In January 1948, he was hired as a research assistant to Nobel Laureate Robert S. Mulliken (1896–1986) at the university's Laboratory of Molecular Structure and Spectra. John R. Platt, known for his work on strong inference, was his supervisor and Clemens C. J. Roothaan was his lab partner. Mulliken and his colleagues made pioneering contributions to molecular orbital physics modeling electron waveforms.

Wright continued work as a research assistant with Mulliken and his colleagues until 1951. However, Wright's interests extended beyond the physics laboratory. He directed a group theater for young adults at the Gads Hill Center in the Pilsen neighborhood of the Lower West Side, Chicago and he took classes from psychologist Carl Rogers and sociologist Lloyd Warner (with whom he would later work at Social Research Inc.). Wright also attended several lectures given by Louis Thurstone, a pioneer in psychological measurement and psychometrics.

Believing that understanding how children learn was even more important than understanding molecular structure, in late spring of 1948 Wright made a dramatic shift of focus. He left a major in physics to enroll in the Committee on Human Development. The committee had been organized in 1940 by then Education Department Chair Ralph W. Tyler to promote cross disciplinary research, which appealed to the young Wright. In 1951, Wright became a counselor at the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago, then directed by Bruno Bettelheim who was also faculty on the Committee on Human Development.