Rate My Professor Daniel Bolt

Daniel Bolt is the Nancy C. Hoefs-Bascom Professor of Educational Psychology and Chair of the Quantitative Methods area in the Department of Educational Psychology within the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his PhD in Psychology with a focus on Quantitative Methods from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999, an MS in Statistics from the same institution in 1995, and a BA in Psychology and Mathematics from Calvin College in 1992. Specializing in quantitative methods, Bolt's research emphasizes the theory and application of psychometric methods across education, psychology, social sciences, and health sciences. Key areas include latent variable models for test validation, assessment of individual differences such as response styles, modeling of student growth, multidimensional item response theory applications to novel item formats in computer-based assessments, and intersections between educational data science and psychometrics. He also serves as a biostatistician at the Waisman Center, contributing to projects involving statistical analysis in social and health sciences.

In his career at UW-Madison, Bolt teaches courses on test theory, factor analysis, and hierarchical linear modeling, for which he received the UW Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2009 and was named a Teaching Academy Fellow in 2005. His scholarly impact is evidenced by prestigious honors, including the Kellett Mid-Career Award in 2019, Vilas Associates Awards in 2014-2016 and 2015-2017, Outstanding Reviewer Awards from AERA in 2013 and 2015, from the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics in 2011 and 2020, and from Psychometrika in 2016 and 2018, as well as the Jason Millman Promising Scholar Award from NCME in 2003. He served as President of the Psychometric Society in 2020 and 2021. Notable publications include "IRT-based response style models and related methodology: Review and commentary" (2025, British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology), "A psychometric perspective on the associations between response accuracy and response time residuals" (2024, Journal of Intelligence), "Theory-driven IRT modeling of vocabulary development" (2025, Journal of Educational Measurement), and earlier influential works such as "A mixture model analysis of differential item functioning" (2005, Journal of Educational Measurement).