UW–Madison student Yiqin Pan was selected to receive the Harold Gulliksen Psychometric Research Fellowship from Educational Testing Service (ETS).
Pan is a PhD student in the Quantitative Methods program in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology.
The fellowship is the most prestigious student award issued by ETS, and is intended to honor Harold Gulliksen, one of the pioneers of psychometrics, who was a professor of psychology at Princeton University and the inaugural director of the ETS fellowship program. The fellowship recognizes graduate students in psychometrics who are working on their dissertations, and are conducting innovative, applied research of the highest quality.
Pan’s research focuses on the application of machine learning methods to educational measurement. For the fellowship, she will be developing two different machine learning algorithms for applications to computerized adaptive testing — one drawing on neuron-network models, and one based on support vector machine approaches — and is applying these algorithms for purposes of item selection, as well as detection of both compromised test items and examinees with pre-knowledge of those items.
Pan will conduct her research project during the 2021-22 year, beginning with participating in the ETS Summer Research and Measurement Sciences Internship Program. Her work will be done under the supervision of her academic advisor, Professor James Wollack, and two ETS mentors, including ETS Distinguished Presidential Appointee Sandip Sinharay and Senior Research Scientist Oren Livne.