R&D Hub

The NAEP research community was hard at work in 2024 exploring new ways to deepen our understanding of student academic achievement and assessment in the United States. We here at the NAEP R&D Hub have shared it all along the way, highlighting the work of innovative researchers (especially in emergent fields such as AI), disseminating news about new and improved tools for researchers, and bringing awareness to relevant conference opportunities and presentations. As we enjoy the holiday season and look forward to a new year and new NAEP internship opportunities, we’d like to look back on some of the NAEP R&D Hub highlights of 2024.

The 2024 NAEP Doctoral Student Internship Program is now in its final weeks, so interns are hard at work applying all the technical skills and knowledge they’ve gained since the beginning of June to their collaborative projects. Get some insight on the program before it ends by checking out our interview with the remaining three 2024 cohort interns: Adalin Ni, Maggie Perkoff, and Winnie Wilberforce.

With the 2024 NAEP Doctoral Student Internship Program well underway, our interns are now developing their technical skills and knowledge in the field of large-scale assessment by working collaboratively with NAEP experts on client-based projects. Recently, two more interns, Paulina Grekov and Dekyi Suolang, participated in our ongoing interviews to introduce the newest cohort to the NAEP R&D community.

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.