Wu joined
CSIRO as a technical officer in 1977. She was made a professor at
Victoria University, Melbourne in 2012. Wu is sceptical about the importance of the
National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (
NAPLAN) and
PISA results due to
measurement errors acquired during collection of data. She is also concerned about the
inferences that can be drawn from assessment data, such as using student performance to evaluate teacher performance. She believes that whilst teachers contribute to education, other factors are likely to be more important. After the data was published on the website
My School, Wu began to speak up about the misuse of
standardised testing. Her efforts resulted into an enquiry into the effectiveness of
NAPLAN. Her findings were confirmed in 2018, when
Les Perelman and
Walt Haney reported that
NAPLAN results of one million students should "be discarded". In 1995, Wu began to concentrate on the development of
Item Response Theory. She developed two
item response software programs that analyse
PISA and
TIMSS data;
ACER ConQuest (1998) and the
R-package
TAM (2010). Wu's contributions to the
Watterson estimator were uncovered by a team of undergraduate students led by
Emilia Huerta-Sánchez (
Brown University) and
Rori Rohlfs (
San Francisco State University). == References ==