R&D Hub

Summer is in full swing, and so is the 2024 NAEP Doctoral Student Internship! Our new interns are busy analyzing NAEP data alongside researchers from the National Center for Education Statistics and the American Institutes for Research. Naomi Duran and Saugat Pandey, two members of this newest intern cohort, have taken the time to answer a few questions and introduce themselves to the NAEP R&D community.

This week, the NAEP R&D program had the opportunity to interview former NAEP doctoral intern Mingqin Zhang. Zhang presented at the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) annual meeting as part of a training session titled “Examining MIRT Models From a Graphical Perspective Using RShiny and Mathematica.” Zhang, now a research scientist at Amazon Web Services, joined the 2018 cohort of NAEP Doctoral Internship Program interns from the University of Iowa, College of Education’s Educational Measurement & Statistics program. We were glad to catch up with her after the conference and ask her some questions about her NAEP Doctoral Internship program experience as the program gets ready to welcome the newest cohort of interns.

The NAEP R&D program recently reconnected with former intern Yichi Zhang at the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) annual meeting, where AIR was presenting a study using the ROME (Bayesian Region of Measurement Equivalence) method she developed during her internship. We followed up after the conference to get her perspective on the NAEP Doctoral Internship program, which is gearing up for its next cohort in June. Read on to learn about Yichi’s experience, including advice for prospective interns and more about her ROME method for advancing equity in educational assessment.

The National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) and American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meetings are taking place in Philadelphia on April 11–14, 2024. In this post, we’re highlighting a small selection of presentations, trainings, and demonstrations from NAEP researchers in the NCES Center for Process Data and the EdSurvey Team, as well as some NAEP Doctoral Internship alumni who are participating in these Annual Meetings. 

Doctoral students can continue to apply through February 2 for the opportunity to work with data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) alongside NAEP researchers from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the American Institutes for Research (AIR). Applicants to the 2024 NAEP Doctoral Student Internship Program will indicate their intent to conduct research in a variety of topic areas; to provide additional context for those weighing their choices, NAEP researchers Cadelle Hemphill and Brittany Boyd have answered some questions about the Re-envisioning Quantitative Information (data visualization) topic area.