Institute of Education Researchers Attend Meeting of American Educational Research Association

Elena Kardanova, the director of the Centre of Education Quality Monitoring, and Alina Ivanova, junior research fellow of the same centre, have participated in the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) held in Washington, DC. The conference dedicated to ‘Public Scholarship to Educate Diverse Democracies’ took place on April 7–12 and gathered around 14000 participants from all over the world.

Elena Kardanova presented her report on ‘Applying the Rasch model to assess cross-cultural comparability of test scores’ at ‘Rasch Measurement Significant Interest Group’ session. It should be noted that it was the first time when a key speaker had been a woman, as well as the first time in the history of the session when a report had been delivered by Russian researchers.   

Other reports included ‘Assessing and Comparing the Quality of Engineering Education: the case of China and Russia’ by Elena Kardanova in cooperation with Prashant Loyalka presented at the workshop on ‘Valid Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Higher Education: Cross-National Comparisons’, and a paper by Alina Ivanova on ‘Equating iPIPS measures across different countries and cultures’ delivered at the workshop on ‘The Challenges of Assessing and Comparing Young Children in Different Cultures’.

According to Elena and Alina, being invited to attend AERA Annual Meetings is a great honour as the conference is highly selective. It is a great opportunity to meet famous researchers because this conference serves as a meeting point for eminent scientists in the field of education and related areas. This year, the list of key-speakers included economist Eric Hanushek from Stanford University and David Andrich from University of Western Australia. Michael Linacre, Andrew Porter, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Warren Simmons were among the conference participants. Additionally, at the conference it is possible to get acquainted with the latest research projects. In order to take part in regular sessions, it is necessary to submit a shortened version of a nearly completed, yet unpublished article. That is why the participants present their newest observations and findings. Finally, attending the conference allows participants to exchange research ideas and receive valuable feedback.