FSU Professor Serves as Visiting Scholar for ETS
President and CEO of ETS, Kurt Langraf, and FSU professor Dr. Lillian Riggs Johnson.

Each summer, Educational Testing Service (ETS), the world’s largest testing organization, invites educators from underrepresented groups across the country to come to its campus in Princeton, NJ for one month to participate in their Visiting Scholars Program. This summer, Fayetteville State University assistant professor of education, Dr. Lillian Riggs Johnson, represented FSU at ETS and brought back knowledge she hopes will better prepare students for the tests.

ETS is the organization responsible for numerous placement and qualification tests. The organization administers the SAT, GRE, TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), and the PRAXIS exams (required for teaching certification), among many others. The Visiting Scholars Program is designed to teach educators about developing, administering, and scoring the tests.

“The goal of the corporation is to make sure that tests produced by the company are fair and contain little or no bias against minorities. The corporation invited faculty from underrepresented groups: Asians, African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans to visit the agency for one month. ETS experts trained the participants by giving them an overview of reviewing and writing exam questions,” Johnson said.
Johnson was one of the 27 educators selected from 200 applicants to participate in the program. The Visiting Scholars Program began on June 5th and lasted until to June 30th, 2006. Participants in the program received a $3,500 honorarium, travel expenses, and hotel suite accommodations.
In her letter to ETS describing why she sought the opportunity to participate in the Visiting Scholars Program, Johnson addressed the difficulty minorities have in taking the PRAXIS I exam, which is required for admittance to FSU’s teacher education program.

“My students asked why the numbers of minority teachers were so low (According to textbook statistics, 87% of U.S. teachers are white), and my response was, until more minorities are able to pass the PRAXIS exams, the numbers will not change,” Johnson said. “Out of the 50 students that I taught, which represents three of the eight sections of the course, only seven students, or 14 percent of the students took PRAXIS I and passed all or part of the test. This statistic suggests that the teacher education program loses a significant number of students before they reach their second semester as teaching majors.”

Johnson hopes her summer at ETS and the information brought back to FSU will help students gain confidence in approaching the PRAXIS exams. She plans to use her experience to give students pointers on taking and passing the tests.

“First of all I’m emphasizing to all of my EDUC 211 classes that I did go to ETS, the corporation that produces the PRAXIS. When I tell my students that I actually spent time at the corporation, in training with people who write the questions, I emphasize that I