Christiana Akande

IMG_9920_finalChristiana Akande’s research interests include Educational Measurement, psychometrics and large scale assessment. Specifically, her research focuses on item response theory equating methods as it relates to multiple linking, evaluating item parameter Drift (IPD) and scale stability over time. She explores the conditions that threaten validity evidence for interpreting test scores and the consequences of basing high-stakes decisions on these scores. She has worked with Dr. David Miller as an assistant in program evaluations for National Science Foundation (NSF), Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and Veterans Affairs (VA) grants.

Christiana obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of Benin, Nigeria in 2007. During her undergraduate years, she volunteered with some research teams for whom she performed duties like data collection and coordination of Focus Group Discussions. Upon graduation, she taught English Language and Verbal Reasoning at the elementary level for about a year. She also taught Business Studies, Mathematics, Economics and Principles of Accounts at the Middle and High school levels for about a year. Finally, she worked as a loan officer in the banking sector in Nigeria for eighteen months before joining the REM program at UF. She obtained her master’s in REM in 2015 and is currently in the doctoral program.

She is currently working on two papers about multiple linking and item parameter drift. Also, she is the current mayor of Tanglewood Village, UF Graduate and Family Housing. In 2014, she received the Certificate of Outstanding Academic Achievement Award from the UF International Center. In 2015, she received the Recognizing Outstanding Volunteers (ROV) Award as well as the International Honorary for Leaders in University Apartment Communities (IHLUAC) Award from UF department of Housing. Also in 2015, she received the Ralph D. Turlington Scholarship/Fellowship from the UF College of Education.

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Zachary Collier

ZacharyEDITEDZachary Collier received his M.A.E. degree in the REM program at the University of Florida in 2015 and then was admitted to the Ph.D. Program. He was awarded the McKnight Doctoral Fellowship to support his graduate studies. He also works as a research assistant for the Lastinger Center for Learning where he performs data analyses for evaluations of two large educational programs.

While completing his master’s degree, he presented research on time series analysis of SAT data at the 11th Annual SAGE Research Symposium. During the fall semester of 2015, he presented twice at the Florida Education Research Association (FERA) Conference. The research based on his master’s thesis received the Distinguished Paper Award from FERA.

Zachary obtained a B.S. in Special Education with Concentration in Emotional Behavior Disorders, Winthrop University, 2013. His background includes serving as an exceptional student education teacher in both general education inclusion and more restricted environments. He taught high school males at a psychiatric residential treatment facility. He also worked as a sixth grade special education teacher for one year at Westwood Middle School in Gainesville, FL, and received the Rookie Teacher of the Year award from Alachua County School District.

His research focus is the advancement and application of finite mixture modeling, particularly latent class and profile analyses. He seeks to develop effective and efficient heuristic optimization data-mining-type search algorithms in structural equation modeling for emerging data intensive applications in education. These intensive datasets include non-random attrition and incomplete longitudinal data.

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Ren Liu

Ren

Ren is from Beijing, China, and joins the research and evaluation methodology program (REM) at UF from the University of Pennsylvania where he received an M.S. in Educational Linguistics. His primary areas of interest are psychometric and statistical methods as applied in the educational, psychological and social sciences. His research has focused on a class of multivariate item response theory models called diagnostic classification models.

These models offer fine-grained information about examinees at the attribute level, which can better support decision-making and policy-forming. He produced five first-authored manuscripts and 13 first-authored conference presentations in psychometrics during his first-year study at REM. Those studies propose ways to refine the model estimation methods using Bayesian statistics, strategies to design more informative tests under the diagnostic framework, or new methods to obtain accurate examinee profiles to support effective intervention.

In addition to methodological research, he collaborates with researchers from multiple disciplines by conducting statistical analysis to answer critical questions. One of the grants that he is currently working on is developing a diagnostic tool for assessing examinees’ morphological awareness. He has also worked with faculty in counseling psychology on projects such as examining the supervisory relationship and the counselor-client therapeutic alliance.

Ren is also specialized in program evaluation. He is the designated graduate assistant of the University of Florida’s five-year Quality Enhancement Plan (2014-2018), an internationalization plan for UF’s accreditation. His main responsibility is to implement and monitor the assessment activities and conduct longitudinal data analysis.

He received Outstanding Academic Achievement Award of the University of Florida in 2015, scholarship awards from the International Center in 2014 and 2015, and he is one of the five students that received the Certificate of Outstanding Merit from the College of Education in 2015.

Prior to his Ph.D. study at UF, he worked in the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, Beijing New Oriental Education & Technology Group, and National Bureau of Statistics of China.

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Francisco Jimenez

IMG_1256Francisco Jimenez was awarded both the 2012 Most Distinguished Paper Award for the paper “Estimating program effects with the short-Interrupted time-series design and multilevel models: An application to the evaluation of a job-embedded Master’s degree program for teachers” and the 2011 Best Overall Student Poster Award for the paper “Effects of outlier item parameters on IRT characteristic curve linking methods under the common-item nonequivalent groups design” from the Florida Educational Research Association.

He received a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Chile and a M.A.Ed. in Research and Evaluation Methodology from the University of Florida. He has also been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chile since 2009. Before joining the REM program as a Fulbright doctoral fellow, he worked as a junior psychometrician in the Measurement Center MIDE UC at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Francisco currently teaches educational measurement and evaluation courses to undergraduate students at the College of Education. His research focuses on the application of multilevel models to longitudinal data and methodological issues on psychometrics, especially those related to IRT equating methods and Bayesian estimation.

 

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