About me

Welcome to my website! My name is Sam Ihlenfeldt (or Samuel D. Ihlenfeldt on publications) and I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Quantitative Methods in Education program at the University of Minnesota. I will be defending my dissertation in August of 2025. My driving belief is that testing can be used for good, but only if it is fair for every stakeholder, including students and parents from all backgrounds. With the support of my advisor, Dr. Michael Rodriguez, I have had the opportunity to apply this belief as an educator, a consultant, and a researcher for both private and public organizations.

Part of the process of fair assessment is communicating test results. If the results of a test (and their intended uses and interpretations) are not communicated properly, any other efforts to validate those uses and interpretations are undermined. For my dissertation, “Do Not Put Red With Our Children: A Thematic Analysis of Somali Perspectives on Score Reporting For State Assessments”, I conducted focus groups with Somali parents to understand how they accessed and reported understanding student reports on state summative assessments. It is my hope that the perspectives of parents can be leveraged to improve score reporting practices. My research was supported by the NCME Mission Fund.

Have a look around this site using the navigation above, and feel free to send me an email if you have any questions. If you are interested, the following papers have been instrumental in guiding my own research:

Kannan, P., Zapata-Rivera, D., & Leibowitz, E. A. (2018). Interpretation of score reports by diverse subgroups of parents. Educational Assessment, 23(3), 173–194.

Randall, J. (2021). “Color‐Neutral” Is Not a Thing: Redefining Construct Definition and Representation through a Justice‐Oriented Critical Antiracist Lens. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 40(4), 82–90.

Zapata-Rivera, D., & Katz, I. R. (2014). Keeping your audience in mind: Applying audience analysis to the design of interactive score reports. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 21(4), 442–463.

Zenisky, A. L., & Hambleton, R. K. (2012). Developing test score reports that work: The process and best practices for effective communication. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 31(2), 21–26.