James P. Henderson, PhD
Expertise + Experience = Excellence
About Dr. Henderson
Jim Henderson is a highly regarded psychometrician with Credentialing Examination Consulting, LLC, a firm that provides a wide array of assessment services. Through the firm, Jim consults on the design, development and use of assessments that employ appropriately rigorous psychometric procedures to yield reliable results. His work supports decisions on such questions as the emphasis to be given to different topics covered in the assessment, the types of questions, how they should be scored, and how the measurement quality of the assessment can be demonstrated with statistics. Finally, he consults on policy and procedure to ensure that assessment programs serve their purposes with integrity and fairness.
Dr. Henderson has a distinguished record of service as a psychometrician and is highly regarded for his expertise in assessment. After earning his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was Assistant Professor of Education at the State University of New York College at Cortland where he taught courses on measurement. He then worked in various capacities at Castle Worldwide, Inc., a company that developed surveys and high stakes assessments, where his last position was as Executive Vice President and Senior Psychometrician. Scantron Corporation bought Castle in 2018, and Jim worked at Scantron as Senior Psychometrician and Senior Vice President until entering semi-retirement in August 2020. He has performed groundbreaking practice analysis studies, designed and managed objectively scored credentialing tests with a wide variety of item types as well as subjectively scored assessments, such as orals, essays, and performance tests, and he has employed a wide range of methods for equating, standard setting, and psychometric analyses.
Jim has contributed to the advancement of high stakes certification and licensure examinations through service to professional organizations in his field, notably the Institute for Credentialing Excellence (ICE) and the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA), which he chaired for three years. A member of the ICE Leadership Council, he was the founding chair of the ICE Research Committee from 2009 to 2014. Probably his biggest contribution to the certification and licensure community, Jim was the Editor of Certification: The ICE Handbook, 3rd Edition, the certification industry’s most authoritative resource on assessment, governance, and policy, published in 2019.
Also in 2019 Jim was honored with the Dennis Falk Lifetime Achievement Award for his service to the credentialing field, having previously received the ICE Leadership Award and ICE Service Award. He served as psychometrician to NCCA from 1993 to 1999, and as NCCA chair from 1996 to 1999. He provided leadership for revision of the NCCA standards used from 2002 through 2014 and for the technical advisory group for psychometrics for the current NCCA standards, which took effect in 2015.