Samantha S. Burg is a doctoral student in Educational Psychology, Measurement, and Evaluation at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She holds a BS degree in engineering from the University of Oklahoma and an MA degree in mathematics education from the University of Georgia. Prior to beginning her doctoral program, she worked in the field of petroleum engineering in Alaska, served as a youth minister in Scotland, and taught high school mathematics in Georgia. Most recently, she has worked as a test development specialist for the state testing program in North Carolina. Ms. Burg first became interested in test anxiety when she was a student teacher and her class refused to take a test; this interest has persisted throughout her doctoral research, some of which examines the ways in which test anxiety may be transmitted in classrooms. Currently, she is a research assistant on a mathematics education project and is very much interested in completing her doctoral work soon, in order to support her tennis-ball-obsessed dog, Spencer, in the fashion to which he has become accustomed. Ms. Burg has presented her research at various professional conferences and is a member of the National Council on Measurement in Education.
