Samuel Messick

Messick was born on April 3, 1931 in Philadelphia. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree, and he earned a PhD from Princeton University.[1]

Messick worked as a psychologist for the Educational Testing Service (ETS).[1] He examined construct validity. Messick influenced language testing in 2 main ways: in proposing a new understanding of how inferences made based on tests must be challenged, and in drawing attention to the consequences of test use.

Messick resided in Pennington, New Jersey.[1] He died on October 6, 1998 in Philadelphia, at 67.[1]

Division 5 of the American Psychological Association named the annual Samuel J. Messick Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award in his honor. One of his collaborators, Douglas N. Jackson, won the award in 2004.

• (ed. with Harold Gulliksen) Psychological scaling: theory and applications; report of a conference. New York: Wiley, 1960.
• (ed. with John Ross) Measurement in personality and cognition. New York: Wiley, 1962.
• (ed. with Silvan Tomkins) Computer simulation of personality: frontier of psychological theory, New York: Wiley, 1963.
• (ed. with Arthur H. Brayfield) Decision and choice; contributions of Sidney Siegel. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
• (ed. with Douglas N. Jackson) Problems in human assessment. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
• (ed.) Individuality in learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1976.
• (ed.) Validity. In R. L. Linn (Ed.) Educational Measurement (3rd ed., pp. 13-103). New York: Macmillan, 1989.

• McNamara, Tim. "Validity in language testing: The challenge of Sam Messick's legacy". Language Assessment Quarterly: An International Journal. 2006, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 31–51
• Weideman, Albert. 2012. "Validation and validity beyond Messick". Per Linguam, Vol. 3, No. 2, Pages 1–14