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2020 NCME Award Recipients Announced

By Megan Welsh posted 12-20-2019 11:49 AM

  

A wide array of awards is presented each year at the annual meeting. The awards committees have been hard at work selecting recipients and are pleased to announce the 2020 award winners.


Alicia Cascallar Award: Edison Choe, Graduate Management Admission Council

EChoe.jpg  The Alicia Cascallar Award for an Outstanding Paper by an Early Career Scholar has been established to honor Alicia’s   professional commitment and accomplishments and to continue her practice of mentoring and encouraging     promising new scholars in the area of educational measurement. As in previous years, submissions were rated on     contribution to the field, technical quality, writing clarity, and overall quality.

  We had one clear winner this year, Edison Choe. Edison derived the sampling distribution of the average test       
   overlap rate in CAT as an asymptotic distribution of a linear transformation of the average rate, enabling 
   the estimation of standard error and thus the construction of confidence intervals. This work was first presented at NCME in 2017 and is now published in Psychometrika.


The nominating letter states, “Beyond the theoretical and practical importance of the study, it is noteworthy to remark on the extraordinary quality of Dr. Choe’s paper itself. You will note from his papers that he employed advanced methodologies from various fields. He fully understands the mathematics and statistics and, more important, was able to apply mathematical concepts to new theory and application. On reading his papers, you will discover that Dr. Choe did a masterful job of building upon the research of others, which, in my view, is the hallmark of a scholar who will have a major impact in his field.”


Committee Chair: Sarah Quesen, Pearson

Nominator: Kyung (Chris) Han


Annual Award
: Michael J. Kolen and Won-Chan Lee, University of Iowa

The NCME Annual Award recognizes exceptional achievement in multiple categories during the previous three years, including an outstanding technical or scientific contribution to the public or the field of educational measurement, or in recognition of exceptional service.

The Annual Awards committee selected the Michael Kolen and Won Chan Lee nomination as the 2020 award winner for their edited work, Mixed-format Tests: Psychometric Properties with a Primary Focus on Equating, Volumes 4 and 5.


The committee believes that the work of Kolen and Lee represents an outstanding technical contribution to the field of educational measurement. This work provides practical guidance to the field in equating and classification of mixed-format assessments. Additionally, the committee agreed that the work should be recognized for its exceptional service to graduate students through its mentorship and inclusion of graduate students in this work.


Committee Chair: Melinda Montgomery, College Board

Nominator: Robert L. Brennan

 

Bradley Hanson Award for Contributions to Educational Measurement: Matthew Johnson and Sandip Sinharay, ETS

JohnsonSinharay.png The Bradley Hanson Award honors Bradley Hanson's contributions to the field and   further advances the goals embodied in his work. Awards honor recently completed   research projects or proposed new research projects that promise to make a substantive   contribution to the field of educational measurement or the development, instruction or   mentoring of new professionals in the field.

 Among the many strong submissions this year, the research project by Matthew Johnson   and Sandip Sinharay – Measures of Agreement for Diagnostic Classification Models –  received the highest rating from committee members. The committee members agreed that it was a strong submission and the topic is one that is very relevant.

The ongoing research project, which has already yielded three published papers, concerns the important topic of reliability-like measures for Diagnostic Classification Models. This topic is particularly apt for a winner of this award because, as the nominating letter notes, Bradley Hanson published extensively on reliability. The letter also states, “The nominated research has already attracted considerable attention of the measurement research community as two of their suggested estimates are now implemented in the popular R package ‘CDM.’ In addition, the nominated papers, although very recent, have already been cited in peer-reviewed publications.”


Committee Chair: Deanna Morgan, College Board

Nominator: Minh Duong

 

Brenda H. Loyd Outstanding Dissertation Award: Seohyun Kim, University of Virginia

SKim.jpg

 The Brenda H. Loyd Award honors an outstanding dissertation in the field of educational measurement.


 The committee has selected Dr. Seohyun Kim as the 2020 NCME Brenda Loyd Outstanding Dissertation Award   Winner.   The work of Seohyun Kim was ranked highest in each of the following four categories: 1. Significance to   the field of educational measurement; 2. Integrity of the methods used; 3. Contribution to the advancement of   research methodology; and 4. Clarity of Writing.


Kim’s dissertation, Constructed Response Data Analysis Using Structural Equation Modeling and Topic Modeling, tackles the difficult subject of statistical analysis of written responses to text prompts and of the scores given to these responses by readers. In the first of a series of three studies, the work explored reliability of constructed responses. The other two studies developed innovative models that analyzed students’ text responses in relation to the numerical scores assigned to them. This dissertation is groundbreaking insofar as topic modeling has not yet been developed in educational, social, and behavioral sciences.


Committee Chair: Shiyu Wang, University of Georgia

Nominator: Zhenqiu (Laura) Lu

 

NCME Career Contributions Award: Mark Wilson, University of California Berkeley

Mwilson.png

 The NCME Award for Career Contributions to Educational Measurement honors a person whose contributions over      a career have had a widespread positive impact on the field. These influential contributions might include: theoretical    or technical developments; ideas or conceptualizations of information to the public about educational measurement      that has widely influence public understanding; and/or applications of theory through procedures, instrument, or          program development that have influenced broadly the nature of measurement and practice.


  The NCME Career Contributions Award Committee is pleased to unanimously endorse the selection of Dr. Mark        Wilson, PhD. as winner of the 2020 Career Awards winner. Dr Wilson has made a significant impact to the field throughout his career on many dimensions. He has made substantial contributions through scholarship with over 350 invited or referred presentations and more than 200 chapters, books, or referred journal articles. His service to the field is also exemplary including service as both the President of NCME and the Psychometric Society, and as an editor, editorial board member, or reviewer for literally dozens of journals. Finally, he has actively impacted the field through a variety of roles on numerous State, National, and International advisory and governing boards. Dr. Wilson has clearly not only been prolific but made high quality and impactful contributions in scholarship, service, and practice that are consistent with the best traditions of this award.


Committee Chair: Michael Jodoin, National Board of Medical Examiners

Nominator: Edward H. Haertel

 

 

Jason Millman Promising Measurement Scholar Award: Shiyu Wang, University of Georgia

After careful evaluation of material from a field of highly qualified nominees, the committee collectively decided to select Shiyu Wang as the winner of the award.

Citing the nomination letter, “Dr. Wang has made several original research contributions to the field of educational measurement. Her current research contributes to personalized assessment and learning from three perspectives: 1) developing innovative adaptive testing that can provide efficient individualized assessments and an examinee-friendly testing environment; 2) establishing statistical foundations for a family of restricted latent class models to provide guidelines for model estimation and selection; 3) developing novel dynamic psychometric models that can measure and predict students’ learning outcomes based on various assessment data, including product data, students’ responses, and process data (response time and learning time) to facilitate the development of adaptive learning.”


Also citing the recommendation letter by Allan Cohen, “Dr. Shiyu Wang is an extremely talented young scholar, who in the three short years since she received her Ph.D., has begun to establish an exceptional record of research. She has combined a level of creativity with excellent academic preparation that is clearly reflected in the very high quality of research that she is producing.”

 

Committee Chair: Kyung (Chris) Han, Graduate Management Admission Council

Nominator: Hua-Hua Chang

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