Quantitative Methods Lab at Southern Methodist University
Quantitative Methods Lab is a research group at Southern Methodist University. We are not officially affiliated to any specific academic/service unit, but housed at the Center on Research and Evaluation (CORE) at SMU. The membership of the QML is cross-institutional, and its members actively study and collaborate on various research topics on quantitative methods and psychometrics in behavioral science and educational research.
Akihito Kamata is a Professor at Southern Methodist University (Department of Education Policy & Leadership, and Department of Psychology). His primary research interest is psychometrics and educational and psychological measurement, focusing on implementation of item-level test data analysis methodology through various modeling framework, including item response theory, multilevel modeling, and structural equation modeling.
Yusuf Kara is a Senior Data Analyst at the Center on Research and Evaluation at Simmons School of Education and Human Development, SMU. His research interests primarily focus on contemporary psychometric methods such as multilevel item response modeling, structural equation modeling, and mediation analysis.
Xinya Liang is Associate Professor of Educational Statistics and Research Methods at the College of Education and Health Professions, University of Arkansas. Her research interests includes Structural equation modeling, Bayesian data analysis, Multilevel modeling, Measurement Invariance, and Large-Scale Assessment.
Chalie Patarapichayatham is a Research Assistant Professor at Simmons School of Education and Human Development at SMU. Her research interests include psychometrics, educational measurement, and statistical analyses of test data, focuses mainly on item-level psychometric analysis, growth modeling, and latent-class analysis.
Cornelis Potgieter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Texas Christian University (TCU). His research interests includes Nonparametric statistics, applications of characteristic functions, spatial statistics, capture-recapture methods, measurement error and latent variable models, generalized skew-symmetric distributions.
Xin Qiao is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Simmons School of Education and Human Development at SMU, funded by two IES grants. She graduated from University of Maryland, College Park in August 2021. Her research interests include cognitive diagnostic models and process data analysis in educational assessment contexts.
Sarunya Somsong is a Visiting Scholar at Simmons School of Education and Human Development at SMU, funded by an IES grant to develop an R package for oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment data. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Applied Behavioral Science Research at Srinakharinwirot University in Thailand. She holds a master’s degree in statistics from Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.
Patrick Lan (SMU)
Nancy Le (SMU)
Kuo Wang (SMU)
Ji Li (Arkansas)
Hao Ma (Currently at Houston Education Research Consortium, Rice University)
Gonca Usta (Cumhuriyet University, Turkey)
Ming-Chuan Hsieh (National Academy for Educational Research, Taiwan)
Gozde Sirganci (Bozok University, Turkey)