Chang awarded NSF grant to provide real-time, actionable data to instructors

Hua-Hua Chang

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to researchers in the Colleges of Education and Engineering will help instructors help students succeed.

To deliver individualized STEM instruction at scale, instructors need assessments that efficiently identify course proficiency for students from diverse backgrounds and abilities. Hua Hua Chang, the Charles R. Hicks Professor of Educational Psychology and Research Methodology, will collaborate with other researchers to build a free, online, adaptive, cognitive diagnostic platform to provide STEM instructors with formative feedback about their students’ skills and knowledge throughout a course.

To do so, they will create an array of cutting-edge cognitive diagnostic computerized adaptive testing (CD-CAT) algorithms. The project, “Collaborative Research: Individualizing Instruction and Improving Research Using Adaptive Testing”, will utilize Chang’s computer adaptive testing (CAT) algorithm to help improve teaching and learning in large STEM courses.

“The significance of the research is its potential to turn CD-CAT theory into large-scale implementation and benefits millions of teachers and students,” Chang said. “It will also open the door for future fundings.”

Purdue received $158,416 and Iowa State received $441,494 from the NSF for the project.

Chang (Co-PI) will collaborate with Jason Morphew (PI), assistant professor of engineering education at Purdue; Ben Van Dusen, assistant professor of education at Iowa State University; and Jayson Nissen (Co-PI), research scholar of Nissen Education Research and Design LLC.