Doctoral student wins competitive spot in national data workshop
A doctoral student at Washington State University’s College of Education has won a competitive spot in a nationally-recognized data training workshop.
Ola Kehinde, an educational psychology student, was chosen by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), to attend its Data Training Workshop in Arlington, Virginia on Feb. 6-8.
“It’s no surprise that Ola was selected for the workshop,” educational psychology assistant professor Shenghai Dai said. “His solid statistics background, rich experience in R programming, and more importantly, his motivation and curiosity in using statistics to address educational problems made him a very good fit for this opportunity. With his training experience, Ola will contribute to several projects of the Large-Scale Data lab in which the NAEP data are hosted.”
Kehinde’s strengths dovetail nicely with the workshop, which is aimed at advanced graduate students and educational researchers with strong statistical skills who want to learn to conduct data analysis using NAEP data.
He said he sees the significance of this workshop on his career and research endeavors and believes that it will equip him with practical knowledge he needs to relate psychometric and NAEP methods to this assessment data.
“I look forward to learning more about some relevant NAEP resources and how to apply them to my research projects not only in graduate school but also in the future,” Kehinde said. “I foresee this providing formative information about student learning and performance.
The NAEP is the only assessment that measures what U.S. students know and can do in various subjects across the nation, states, and in some urban districts. Also known as “The Nation’s Report Card,”the NAEP has provided information about student academic performance since 1969.
“This opportunity represents how the Large-Scale Data Laboratory is increasing research capacity and rigorous training for our doctoral students to use NAEP data to examine and inform our national education policies and practices,” said Brian French, the College of Education’s associate dean for research and external funding.
