Project Director

David Kaplan, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Wisconsin - Madison

David Kaplan is the Patricia Busk Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Dr. Kaplan holds affiliate appointments in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Population Health Sciences and the Center for Demography and Ecology.  Dr. Kaplan’s program of research focuses on the development of Bayesian statistical methods for education research. His work on these topics is directed toward applications to large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal survey designs.  Dr. Kaplan is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, a recipient of the Samuel J. Messick Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the American Psychological Association (Division 5), a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 5), a recipient of the Alexander Von Humboldt Research Award, an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford., a fellow of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Research and Information, and was a Jeanne Griffith Fellow at the National Center for Education Statistics.  Dr. Kaplan received his Ph.D. in education from UCLA in 1987.

Homepage: edpsych.education.wisc.edu/fac-staff/kaplan-david/
email: david.kaplan@wisc.edu

Collaborators

Nina Jude is co-principal investigator on IES Grant # R305D220012 “Bayesian Probabilistic Forecasting with International Large-Scale Assessments.”  Professor Nina Jude is the director of the Institut für Bildungswissenshaft (Institute for Education Science) and head of the Department for National and International Education Studies at the University of Heidelberg. Jude is an internationally recognized authority on policy and design issues associated with international large-scale assessments, and she will be responsible for the substantive and policy-oriented focus of this work.  Her current research focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education. Together with an international research consortium, she initiated a tri-national longitudinal study on school development in challenging times supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation. Dr. Jude has published over 50 peer reviewed articles, book chapters, and edited volumes focusing on (a) the dimensionality of constructs in multilevel settings, (b) the relevance of context factors for education, and (c) secondary analyses of PISA data using context questionnaire information over time to track countries’ progress in different content areas. Her broad knowledge about quality indicators for learning and instruction is applied in regular teacher training courses at the Universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg.

Graduate Project Assistants

Kjorte Harra is currently a Ph.D. student in the Quantitative Methods area of the Educational Psychology Department at UW-Madison. She received her bachelor's degree in Psychology at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her research interests include Bayesian methods and their applications to large scale assessments and social science research.

Mingya Annie Huang is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Educational Psychology concentrating on Quantitative Methods at UW-Madison. She received her bachelor’s degree in Education and Psychology at the University of Macau. Mingya continued her master’s study in Educational Psychology (Quantitative Methodology) and worked as a quantitative research assistant at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Her research interests lie in Bayesian approaches and their applications in the social science, including Bayesian model averaging in hierarchical linear models, Bayesian methods in structural equation modeling, as well as large scale assessment.

Weicong Lyu is a Ph.D. student in the Quantitative Methods area within the Department of Educational Psychology at UW-Madison. He received his B.S. in Statistics, B.A. in Economics and M.A. in Economics of Education from Peking University, China. He worked on causal inference methods for quantitative social science research, especially propensity score analysis. His areas of interest include Bayesian methods, graphical models and latent variable models. Besides educational measurement and statistics, he is also interested in econometric theory and statistical learning.

Jonas Stampka s currently a Ph.D. student in the Department for National and International Education Studies at the University of Heidelberg. He received his bachelor’s degree at Humboldt University Berlin and continued his master’s at University of Heidelberg in education science. His main interests lie in international education policy and theory of global education. Including mass schooling, transfer of systems and quality assurance.

Sinan Yavuz is currently a Ph.D. student in the Quantitative Methods program, Department of Educational Psychology at UW-Madison. He is a project assistant in the Interactive Learning and Design Lab. He received his combined bachelor's and master's degree in the Biology Teaching Department from Gazi University, Turkey. He has worked for seven years as a research assistant in three different universities and meanwhile he taught Educational Measurement and Evaluation and Learning and Developmental Psychology courses to university graduates for three years in private institutions in Turkey. He was a Ph.D. candidate in the Educational Measurement and Evaluation Department at Hacettepe University. During his previous Ph.D. studies in Turkey, he participated in national projects supported by UNICEF and the Turkish National Ministry of Education. His primary interests are in Bayesian approaches for educational research designs, Bayesian growth models in education, Bayesian approaches to missing data analyses, and extensions of Bayesian model averaging to multilevel models. 

Previous Collaborators

Jianshen (Cassie) Chen was co-Principal Investigator on IES grant # R305D110001, “Bayesian Dynamic Borrowing: A Method for Utilizing Historical Data in Education Research”.  Dr. Chen is currently a psychometrician in the Learning, Evaluation and Research Division at College Board. Prior to that, Dr. Chen worked at Educational Testing Service for four years. Dr. Chen received her Ph.D. in quantitative methods program from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014. She has comprehensive research and practical experience in Bayesian inference and statistical modeling in educational assessment.

Alumni

• Chansoon (Danielle) Lee, Measurement Scientist, American Board of Internal Medicine
• Soojin Park, Ph.D.  Assistant Professor, University of California, Riverside
• Jianshen (Cassie) Chen, Ph.D, Associate Psychometrician, The College Board
• Sarah Depaoli, Ph.D. Associate Professor, University of California, Merced