Priya Kanan a third year PhD student in the Research Methodology program, Department of Psychology in Education has two Masters Degrees, one in Organizational Behavior (Bangalore University, India) and one in Industrial/Organizational Psychology (Minnesota State University). Prior to moving to Pittsburgh, Priya was an Adjunct Faculty at MSU. As a graduate student assistant, she works with Dr. Kevin Kim, but is also involved in a project with Dr. Suzanne Lane (and
Drs. Ellice Forman and Jen Cartier from the Department of Instruction and Learning). Priya teaches Masters level courses (Introduction to Research Methods) for the Department, and have a Teaching Fellowship with PSYED. She plans on graduating in 2008.
Xiaowen Zhuis is also a third year student in the Research Methodology program. During the 2006 summer she was an intern at Educational Testing Service (ETS) where she worked on the development of population invariance indicies in score equating. Xiaowen received a bachelor's degree in engineering from China where she worked as an electrical engineer for several years. Her research interests are in the theory and application of psychometric and statistical methods in educational measurement. Currently,
she is involved in two projects: one is the evaluation of the intervention programs designed to align school curricula with the state assessment in PA; the other is a simulation study of fitting CFA model to EFA data. Xiaowen received a 2006 student research grant from School of Education for the proposal “Evaluating different methods for assessing treatment effects in observational studies”.
Dr. Louis Pingel, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs teaches in the Research Methodology program. He has been awarded the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and has an open door policy with his students. Dr Pingel has served the school in a variety of administrative roles including Chair, Department of Psychology in Education and a member of the University Council on Graduate Studies. Dr. Pingel is also the advisor to the Council on
Graduate Studies in Education (CGSE).
