RIYADH: The National Center for Assessment (NCA), known here as Qiyas, announced Monday that a foreign academic has won its 2015 award for Excellence in Research and Development.

George Engelhard Jr. will receive his award at the Second International Conference for Assessment and Evaluation starting Tuesday in Riyadh. His book, “Invariant Measurement: Using Rasch Models in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences” won for its “outstanding scholarly work.”

According to a report on the NCA website, the book would serve a broad spectrum of users including graduate students, instructors and test developers.

“It also emphasizes invariant measurement as an important notion for test usability and precisions, as well as other important issues related to measurement concepts and their practical applications,” the committee stated.

It said that the work covers technical measurement concepts “in a highly comprehensible language coupled with illustrative examples from different fields.”

“This makes the concept accessible to a wide spectrum of readers, psychometricians, or users with a limited background in measurement,” the committee stated.