Are you traveling to Philadelphia, PA for the Eastern Psychological Association’s 2024 annual meeting? RMME is–and we’d love to meet you! Join us at booth #20 (Franklin Hall A, Downtown Marriott), for an opportunity to chat personally with Dr. Sarah D. Newton, the Associate Director of RMME Online Programs!
What are RMME faculty up to? Check out Dr. Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead’s Evaluation Café talk on February 28, 2024, at 12pm ET, to find out! Her featured presentation is entitled, “Modernizing Evaluation’s Cartography, Architectural Blueprint, and Definition”. Register here to reserve your spot in this excellent session: http://tinyurl.com/EvalCafe2024-BMM
ABSTRACT: In this Evaluation Café presentation, Dr. Montrosse-Moorhead will preview the Country of the Mind map, where the Evaluation Building is located on this map, and a close-up of the building itself. None of these have been visualized before in published scholarship. Dr. Montrosse-Moorhead will also share the proposed amended definition, why it is necessary, and the implications of adopting the amended definitions for evaluation practice; the implications for the instruments, methods, and techniques we use; and the implications for evaluation’s theoretical and metatheoretical scholarship.
On February 21, 2024, Dr. Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead (Associate Professor in RMME Programs) joined MERL Tech’s Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) to discuss the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on future evaluation practice. This exciting panel also included other experts in the field, including Sarah Mason, Izzy Thornton, Tarek Azzam, Sahiti Bhaskara, and Blake Beckmann. The session covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from the birth of AI to consulting challenges and AI competencies. Click here for more information on the talk and to register for part two of this discussion series!
RMME is growing! We are currently seeking qualified instructors to teach graduate-level courses in Research Methods, Educational Measurement, Quantitative Methods, and Evaluation. Connecticut residents are especially encouraged to apply! Interested candidates should apply here.
UConn’s Research Methods, Measurement, & Evaluation (RMME) Programs are excited to celebrate our newest graduates from RMME Master’s degree program and RMME’s Graduate Certificate in Program Evaluation program! We cannot wait to see all of the many ways you will make us proud, as a new RMME graduate! Congratulations, all, from the Research Methods, Measurement, & Evaluation Community!
The Research Methods, Measurement, & Evaluation (RMME) program is proud to recognize this year’s recipient of the 2023 RMME Book Award: Erbin Huang! Congratulations on this fantastic accomplishment, from the Research Methods, Measurement, & Evaluation Community!
The 2024 Modern Modeling Methods (M3) Conference is currently accepting proposals. Review the full call for proposals at: https://modeling.uconn.edu/call-for-proposals-2024/
Submit today! Proposals are due January 29!
For more information, visit: https://modeling.uconn.edu/
RMME/STAT Joint Colloquium
Some New Developments on Pairwise Likelihood Estimation & Testing in Latent Variable Models
Dr. Irini Moustaki
London School of Economics
Friday, December 1, at 11AM ET
https://tinyurl.com/rmme-Moustaki
Pairwise likelihood is a limited-information method used to estimate latent variable models, including factor analyses of categorical data. It avoids evaluating high-dimensional integrals and, thus, is computationally more efficient than full information maximum likelihood. This talk will discuss two new developments in the estimation and testing of latent variable models for binary data under the pairwise likelihood framework. The first development is about estimation and limited information goodness-of-fit test statistics under complex sampling. The performance of the estimation and the proposed test statistics under simple random sampling and unequal probability sampling is evaluated using simulated data. The second development focuses on computational aspects of pairwise likelihood. Despite its computational advantages it can still be demanding for large-scale problems that involve many observed variables. We propose an approximation of the pairwise likelihood estimator, derived from an optimization procedure relying on stochastic gradients. The stochastic gradients are constructed by subsampling the pairwise log-likelihood contributions, for which the subsampling scheme controls the per-iteration computational complexity. The stochastic estimator is shown to be asymptotically equivalent to the pairwise likelihood one. However, finite sample performances can be improved by compounding the sampling variability of the data with the uncertainty introduced by the subsampling scheme. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method using simulation studies and two real data applications.
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RMME Master’s program alumna, Dr. Merve Sarac, delivers a presentation with Professor James Wollack at the 2023 Conference on Test Security. Congratulations on this outstanding work, from the Research Methods, Measurement, & Evaluation Community!
Dr. D. Betsy McCoach (RMME Faculty member, Discussant), Amanda Sutter (RMME PhD Student, Presenter), Marcus Harris (RMME PhD Student, Presenter), Claudia Ventura (RMME PhD Student, Presenter), Faeze Safari (RMME PhD Student, Presenter), & Kirsten Reyna (RMME PhD Student, Presenter) present a symposium on “The Future of Educational Measurement” at NERA 2023. Congratulations on this excellent symposium, from the Research Methods, Measurement, & Evaluation Community!
Symposium Chair/Discussant: D. Betsy McCoach
Symposium Presenters: Amanda Sutter, Marcus Harris, Claudia Ventura, Faeze Safari, & Kirsten Reyna
Symposium Abstract: Emergent measurement scholars provide their perspective on current issues and future directions in educational measurement. The four presentations focus on 4 critical areas: 1.) Equity and social justice, 2.) The context in which we operate, 3.) The rise of artificial intelligence, and 4.) Graduate training in educational measurement.
Symposium Presentations:
1) Context Matters
Amanda Sutter, Marcus Harris
2) Equity and Social Justice Issues and Values in Measurement
Claudia Ventura, Amanda Sutter
3) Exploring the Challenges and Potential of Artificial Intelligence in Educational Measurement
Faeze Safari, Kirsten Reyna
4) Transforming Graduate School Training: Advancing Measurement and Open Science
Marcus Harris, Kirsten Reyna
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