Leah McGuire, educational psychology assistant professor, has been awarded a University of Minnesota IDEA Multicultural Research Award for her proposal, “Investigating Differential Context Effects in Statistics Assessments.”
The project aims to discover features of contexts that can predict differential difficulty in assessment items. Specifically, her project takes an Explanatory Item Response Modeling approach to model group differences related to item context. The results will then be used to discuss the impact of certain contexts on student scores as well as to suggest guidelines for writing fair contexts.