Paul Dizona, CYFS graduate assistant, has received the Psychological Assessment Young Scholars Award from the American Psychological Association.
The award recognizes his research poster, titled “Pre-K Measurement Triangulation Using Caregiver and Directly Assessed Measures of Cognitive Ability,” which Dizona will present at the 2017 APA Convention Aug. 2-6.
This project was all about trying to boil down school readiness into something you can use.
Paul Dizona, graduate student
Dizona’s research uses a sample of 2,400 Mongolian preschool children and their teachers who are part of a larger study examining an international measure of school readiness. Researchers measured children on approximately 100 tasks, while asking children’s teachers corresponding questions.
“There’s truth in both perspectives,” said Dizona, a fourth-year graduate student in quantitative, qualitative and psychometric methods. “A child might get nervous counting to 10 and not perform as usual, but a teacher might say ‘Yes, she can do that.'”
Using the survey data from children and their classroom teachers, Dizona applied structural equation modeling to combine the two datasets into a single score.
“This project was all about trying to boil down school readiness into something you can use,” Dizona said.