Christopher Thorn

Biography

Photo of Christopher Thorn

Christopher Thorn is the the Associate Director of the Value Added Research Center (VARC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His primary work at VARC is to collaborate with colleagues at Vanderbilt University to provide technical assistance to recipients of the U.S. Department of Education Teacher Incentive Fund Grants. VARC is also engaged in research with a number of districts, including Milwaukee and Chicago Public Schools, to develop and extend value-added models for accountability, evaluation, and school improvement.

Thorn also serves as the Director of Technical Services at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER). He has worked on over a dozen different research projects over the past decade — including the development of software for the qualitative analysis of large-scale video collections, building and testing training materials for school-level data use, and deploying enterprise collaboration tools for a project spanning all four time zones in the continental United States.

His interest in gaming is a happy combination of interests in measuring student and teacher learning and socio-technical systems. He has been an avid multiplayer gamer since the early paperback D&D edition in the mid-1970s. Thorn believes that what we have learned about delivering value-added technologies to high stakes assessments can be applied to gaming.

Sessions