Michael Ben-Avie

Dr. Michael Ben-Avie is Senior Director of Learning Assessment and Research at Quinnipiac University. Dr. Ben-Avie is an academic psychologist and educational researcher whose academic disciplines include psycholinguistics, psychological research, statistics, and education. At Quinnipiac University, he conducts longitudinal, cohort studies to discern the impact of college on students’ learning and development, including predictive models using an AI to inform the design and necessary intensity of university interventions to promote students’ persistence, academic achievement, and graduation. He received a 2017 “Excellence in Assessment Designation” from the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA). IBM developed a “use case” of his research as the first person to use IBM’s Watson Analytics to analyze a university’s institutional data for accreditation and academic program review. In 2018, received Campus Technology’s Impact Award for the use of AI and machine learning techniques to analyze the results of a 10-year longitudinal cohort study of college success. Dr. Ben-Avie has been a major contributor to the VALUE Institute development for assessing student learning quality, strengthening methodological reliability and validity, and leveraging quality liberal education at the state and national levels of evidence and reporting.