The award honors Clauser for his innovative and technically sophisticated contributions to credentialing assessment in the areas of automated scoring, standard setting, and differential item functioning. Clauser is currently a senior psychometrician at the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), where he is responsible for directing psychometric research on a computer-based performance assessment of physicians' patient management skills. Clauser has made significant contributions to the literature on the development of procedures or algorithms for use in scoring performance assessments by machine -- a new area of research that is critical in facilitating the use of more authentic assessments for licensure and certification purposes. Typically, performance assessments are scored by expert judges who individually rate each examinee's performance, a time-consuming and costly process that often limits the use of such assessments. Clauser has also extended research on the use of authentic assessments for credentialing purposes through studies of alternative methods for setting standards on high-stakes performance assessments.

The award also recognizes Clauser's extensive contributions in the area of differential item functioning -- a psychometric term used to describe items that show differences in performance for groups of examinees of the same ability, which are attributable to extraneous factors such as gender or ethnicity. Identifying items that exhibit this quality is clearly important in ensuring the validity of test score interpretations. Clauser has studied alternative methods for detecting differential item functioning for various kinds of tests, including performance assessments and tests that assess examinees on more than one dimension, and he has investigated procedures for identifying nonuniform differential item functioning.