Marion Shaycoft Papers

Marion F. Shaycoft (1917-2014), Barnard class of 1938, was a statistician and psychologist.

Shaycoft was born on August 30, 1917 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She majored in math as a scholarship student at Barnard College, where she was selected for Phi Beta Kappa and won the Kohn Mathematics Prize. She went on to complete a Master’s in measurement and educational research at Teachers College, Columbia University. She did additional graduate work in psychology at University of Pittsburgh.

Shaycoft spent most of her career at Washington-based American Institutes for Research (AIR), where she served as principal research scientist and was one of the lead researchers on Project Talent, a massive survey of nearly 400,000 students in 1,200 high schools conducted for the federal government in the early 1960s. Shaycoft wrote many of the tests and oversaw other tests used in the study, which collected information on aptitude, achievement, aspirations, health and family background.

Before joining AIR in 1951, she worked in developing tests and statistical analyses for the National League of Nursing Education, World Book Company, the Graduate Record Examination Office, and the Cooperative Test Service of the American Council on Education.

Shaycoft was also the author of Handbook of Criterion-Referenced Testing: Development, Evaluation, and Use (1979), a reference work cited in numerous other books and articles on test design.

Beyond school testing, her work included pre-employment testing for pilots, nurses and other occupational groups. Throughout her career at AIR, she advised a number of studies on problems in sampling, measurement, test design and statistical analysis.

Shaycoft died December 10, 2014 at Hillhaven, an assisted living and memory care facility near Washington, D.C. at 97 years of age.