Professor in the School of Education, Tel Aviv University, where she heads the Research, Measurement, and Evaluation Methodologies program. Her main research interests are: analysis of learning interactions (in both face to face and distance learning); assessment for learning (in clasrooms and in school- based professional communities); and large-scale diagnostic assessment. Prof. Birenbaum earned her Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981.