Thus, Wright's education was shaped by early advocates of integrating scientific assessment into the classroom, including Elisabeth Irwin and Bank Street College founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell.

[6] The Cornell physics faculty included Richard Feynman who, in parallel with John von Neumann, had begun adapting an IBM business punch card machine to solve the Los Alamos physicists’ linear equations more quickly.

In the summer of 1947, after graduating from Cornell and receiving an honorable discharge from the US Navy, Wright interned at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate Charles H. Townes.

In January 1948, he was hired as a research assistant to Nobel Laureate Robert S. Mulliken (1896–1986) at the university's Laboratory of Molecular Structure and Spectra.

He directed a group theater for young adults at the Gads Hill Center in the Pilsen neighborhood of the Lower West Side, Chicago and he took classes from psychologist Carl Rogers and sociologist Lloyd Warner (with whom he would later work at Social Research Inc.).

The committee had been organized in 1940 by then Education Department Chair Ralph W. Tyler to promote cross disciplinary research,[12] which appealed to the young Wright.

In 1951, Wright became a counselor at the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago, then directed by Bruno Bettelheim who was also faculty on the Committee on Human Development.

Wright was dissatisfied with the results of the factor analysis work he'd been doing in the late 1950s on semantic differential data from Chicago area firms' marketing projects.

"[11] Extending Rasch's own analogies from James Clerk Maxwell's analysis of mass, force, and acceleration,[18] Wright subsequently used an everyday yardstick in his teaching to convey measurement concepts simply and clearly.

Wright's former students include leaders in psychometrics in academic, commercial, and governmental positions globally, such as Wan Rani Abdullah, Raymond Adams, David Andrich, Betty Bergstrom, Nikolaus Bezruczko, Brian Bontempo, William Boone, Ong Kim Lee, Sunhee Chae, Chih-Hung Chang, Bruce H. Choppin, Yi Du, Graham Douglas, George Engelhard, Jr., Patrick B. Fisher, William P. Fisher, Jr., Richard Gershon, Dorothea Juul, George Karabatsos, Ross Lambert, John M. Linacre, Larry Ludlow, Geofferey Masters, Ronald Mead, Robert Mislevy, Mark Moulton, Carol Myford, Nargis Panchapakesan, Wendy Rheault, Matthew Schulz, Richard M. Smith, John Stahl, Douglas Stone, Gregory Stone, Donna Surges Tatum, Herbert Walberg, Mark Wilson, Lih Mei Yang, and many others.

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement has conferred the IEA Bruce H. Choppin Memorial Award on new researchers doing innovative work in education-related areas since 1985.

[21] Colleagues influenced by Wright include Pedro Alvarez, Trevor Bond, Abraham Bookstein, David Cella, Anne G. Fisher, Christine Fox, Carl Granger, Kathy Green, Richard F. Harvey, Allen Heinemann, Ellen Julian, Elena Kardanova, Rense Lange, Alain Leplege, Mary Lunz, Anatoli Maslak, Robert Massof, Magdalena Mok, Fred Shaw, Kenneth Royal, Everett V. Smith, A. Jackson Stenner, Mark Stone, Alan Tennant, Luigi Tesio, Richard Woodcock, Weimo Zhu, and many others.

[24] 1979: Founds MESA Press and published the landmark Best Test Design with Mark Stone, cited 3,130 times according to Google Scholar as of 18 November 2019.

[28] IOMW continues to be a forum for new developments in measurement theory and practice, with plans for the 20th meeting to be held at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2020.

1982: MESA Press published Rating Scale Analysis by Wright and Geofferey Masters, cited 4,049 times according to Google Scholar as of 18 November 2019.

Publication of Rasch Measurement Transactions begins, with Richard M. Smith as editor; volume 32, number 4, of this quarterly bulletin came out in late 2019.

[32] 2009: Second conference celebrating Wright's work, also held at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago[33] and documented in a special issue of the Journal of Applied Measurement[34] Association of Test Publishers Career Recognition Award in Computer-Based Testing, 2001[35] Institute for Objective Measurement Lifetime Achievement Award, 2003[31] About 200 journal articles – cited 231 times in 2009.