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DRAFT DRAFT
Department of Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation
Strategic Plan Annual Update
May 2, 2006
1. Maintain and increase national and international recognition for excellence of programs.
Although there are no national ranking in our field, EDMS is generally recognized as one of the top two or three programs of its type in the country. Notable accomplishments this year have included:
(a) Four of our doctoral graduates have accepted tenure-track university positions in research universities for fall 2006: Roy Levy – Arizona State University; Karen Samuelsen – University of Georgia where the department chair is Deborah Bandelos, an earlier graduate of EDMS; Jaehwa Choi – George Washington University; and Weihua Fan – University of Houston.
(b) We successfully completed an international search for our open tenure-track position created when Jim Roberts left for Georgia Tech University. Jeff Harring, with a degree from the University of Minnesota, will be joining our faculty next fall.
(c) Our start-up activities for the new center, CILVR, have included several submitted grant proposals as well as scheduling a major conference on latent variable modeling on campus this May. The center was able to attract several very prominent presenters from across the country (e.g., Bengt Muthen from UCLA).
(d) Given the demise of C-SAVE, our external funding experienced a temporary negative shift. However, the MARCES, PADI and CISCO projects continue to receive substantial outside funding and we have very actively pursued funding the connection with the new CILVR center although this is all currently pending. MARCES (R. Lissitz) has about $1,560,000 in current funding with current requests for about $225,000 in additional funding. PADI, CISCO, CRESST (R. Mislevy) have about $1,460,000 in current funding with requests for about $1,000,000 in additional funding.
(e) Our faculty and students are very active in making presentations at national and international meetings. Last year, our faculty had 19 conference presentations, 13 of which were joint presentations with graduate students; one of these was an invited presentation at an internal conference (Switzerland). With respect to publications, all of the major journals in our field are international in scope and we had 8 articles published and another 8 accepted for publication. In addition, three edited books were published and faculty authored a total of 16 book chapters.
2. Provide excellent graduate {and undergraduate} education to a high quality and diverse student body.
We have continued our recruitment efforts which tend to yield exceptionally highly qualified candidates. As mentioned last year, we have reached a point where substantially increasing the number of doctoral students cannot be sustained given present faculty resources since much of our advanced training involves independent study with graduate advisors. However, as shown below, we have had a modest increase in the number of students enrolled. On the positive side, we have found support for our graduate students in other campus locations including the Middle States evaluation office, UMUC and OIRP.
FY 2001 / FY 2002 / FY 2003 / FY 2004 / FY 2005# of Students Enrolled / 31 / 36 / 42 / 48 / 56
Masters / 11 / 12 / 11 / 16 / 17
Doctoral / 20 / 24 / 31 / 32 / 39
New Grad Ss Enrolled / 9 / 10 / 14 / 16 / 10
Masters / 4 / 6 / 5 / 6 / 6
Doctoral / 5 / 4 / 9 / 10 / 5
Mean GRE-Enrolled Masters / 2095 / 2008 / 1988 / 1943
Mean Quant GRE / 750 / 758 / 673 / 762
Mean GRE-Enrolled Doctoral / 2093 / 1833 / 2155 / 1913
Mean Quant GRE / 720 / 733 / 788 / 743
Although from some points of view, our student population is very diverse (52% Asian, for example), we have relatively few students in recognized minority categories: 4 African Americans (about 7%) and 1 American Indian (about 1.8%) with no current graduate student indicating Hispanic identification. We enroll 38 female graduate students (68%) and 31 of our students (55%) are on some type of financial support (TA, GA, Fellowship, Internship, etc.).
3. Enhance excellence in research.
Our research funding and scholarly production is summarized under item 1., above. Although we lost one research center (C-SAVE) this year, we have initiated a new center (CILVR) that, in time, is expected to enhance our research agenda.
Several of our students received awards that provide evidence for the high quality of our research training. In particular, Jaehwa Choi received a UM Graduate School Fellowship for the spring semester, 2006; Yunyun Dai received an MCAT Summer Fellowship; Roy Levy received a year-long ETS Gulliksen Fellowship for 2005-2006; and Hua Wei received a Pearson Summer Internship from ETS.
4. Serve the local and global communities in ways that are collaborative and consistent with our mission.
As in former years, we have had the goal of enhancing our outreach efforts by increasing the number of connections with education agencies. Starting this spring (2006), the Maryland Assessment Consortium will be housed in EDMS. The Consortium, established in 1991, represents a collaboration of Maryland's school systems and offers high-quality staff development programs on performance assessment as well as collaborating to develop, field test, validate, and disseminate formative performance assessments for use by teachers as part of their instructional programs. The Consortium, directed by Kathryn Alvestad who is a Lecturer in EDMS, will significantly increase the visibility of our programs and services to public schools in Maryland.
Also, contributing to our collaborative goal, MARCES, directed by Bob Lissitz, remains a focal point for our interaction with various educational agencies including the National Center for Educational Statistics and the Maryland State Department of Education. Annually, MARCES conducts more than a dozen projects with such agencies. We continue our attempts to increase the activity at MARCES and feel that this has been a highly successful center. In addition, the PADI project (Principled Assessment Designs for Inquiry) directed by Bob Mislevy has joint projects with the University of Michigan and with UC Berkeley.
By the end of this academic year, we will have staged two national conferences. In November, 2005, MARCES sponsored the “Conference on Longitudinal Modeling of Student Achievement” with partial funding by MSDE. This event drew over 200 participants. In May, 2006, CILVR is sponsoring a conference on “Mixture Models in Latent Variable Research” with a pre-session featuring Bengt Muthen (internationally known for his work in structural equation modeling) and a post-session featuring Matthias van Davier from Educational Testing Service. Current registration suggests that this conference will draw at least 100 participants.
Our goal, implemented by our Seminar & Training Center, has been to offer 4 – 6 workshops per year. We have not been successful in offering a substantial number of workshops with 2 offered this academic year. There is limited interest in conducting workshops among full-time faculty due to heavy research commitments and the financial benefits of bringing in outside experts is, in general, not promising as our experience with this suggests. However, we have been sponsoring several symposia each year using faculty from other units both within and outside the College as well as local-area talent. These are primarily for the benefit of our supported graduate students who are required to attend and do not provide any financial benefit to EDMS.
5. Ensure an administrative, operational and fiscal infrastructure that supports a highly ranked college of education
We are eager to contribute to the College goal of securing one endowed chair in each department. The prospects for this, frankly, are not good in our field but there are, nationally, a couple of endowed chairs in our field and we will continue efforts in this direction.
Historically, the Chair of EDMS has acted as the Graduate Coordinator for our programs. Beginning this spring, George Macready has assumed the role of Graduate Coordinator with duties that include overseeing staffing and coordinating our multi-sectioned undergraduate courses, EDMS 410 and EDMS 451.
This spring, students acting in the roles of teaching assistants, tutors for our courses and graduate assistants were relocated from diverse locations in several buildings to unified space in Cole. We believe this provides both greater efficiency and a more collegial atmosphere for our students.
Each year, the Department conducts a full-day retreat to give in-depth consideration to issues that affect all aspects of our programs. Some major topics that were considered included:
(1) Direct admission from undergraduate school to our PhD program; decided against this as a general policy but allowed for exceptions by the Chair.
(2) Concern about the degree to which fellowship students are being integrated into our department.
(3) The focus of the doctoral comprehensive examination with respect to doctoral research area.
(4) The possibility of offering a non-research degree (e.g., EdD).
(5) The issue of setting preferred application date for best consideration for financial support; a survey of seven comparable units across the country showed four with a December 1 deadline, two with a deadline near January 1 and one with a deadline of February 15.
(6) The issue of the length of time that masters and doctoral students can expect financial support from EDMS.
(7) The new +/- grading option and agreed to require its use in EDMS 410 and EDMS 451; instructors of record in 600-level and above courses may use their own discretion.
(8) Agreed to undertake a review of content in EDMS 410 and EDMS 451 as well as the issue of common midterm and final examinations for these courses.
(9) Chair agreed to attempt to offer EDMS 724 in the fall 2006 semester using an adjunct faculty member.
(10) Considered wide range of issues relative to off-campus programs.
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