OVCAA in collaboration with the Faculty of Education holds its first Research Conversations webinar series of 2021

The UP Open University (UPOU) Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs (OVCAA), in collaboration with the UPOU Faculty of Education, conducted the first webinar on Research Conversations Series for 2021 with Dr. William J. Boone as the resource speaker. Dr. Boone, a professor at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio, USA) specializing in Evaluation, Measurement and Statistical Analysis, and author of two books on Rasch Analysis, namely “Rasch Analysis in the Human Sciences” and “Advances in Rasch Analysis in the Human Sciences” (Springer Publishers), gave a talk on “Why Learn About Rasch Measurement?” as a research approach. The webinar was held on 19 February 2021 (Friday), 8:30AM to 10:30AM (PHT) and was participated in by viewers from national and international locations.

Dr. Maria Rowena D.R. Raymundo, Assistant Professor and Assistant to the Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs on Quality Assurance delivered the opening remarks and discussed a brief overview of the research conversation webinar series. She also gave a glimpse of the speaker’s background.

UPOU’s Research Conversations is an on-going UPOU activity which had its first session as early as 2016. It aims to improve research productivity and inculcate a research culture among UPOU’s faculty, research staff, administrative personnel and its students. It had always adopted a flexible format providing avenues to encourage research collaboration at all levels.

Dr. William J. Boone shared his expertise in Rasch analysis through his talk on “Why Learn About Rasch Measurement?”. He emphasized the simplicity of Rasch measurement in such a way that you don’t need to be a math expert to learn Rasch and to use Rasch. He enumerates when to use Rasch in surveys and tests. He mentions that Rasch provides state of the art techniques to evaluate reliability, validity evidence (many types of validity evidence), and measurement functioning of surveys and tests. One important note he pointed out is that Rasch does not assume all items have the same difficulty. He also illustrated the famous Wright Maps and demonstrated how to run Rasch analysis using the Winsteps Rasch software.

The Rasch model, named after Danish mathematician Georg Rasch, is a psychometric model for analyzing categorical data, such as answers to questions on a reading assessment or questionnaire responses, as a function of the trade-off between (a) the respondent’s abilities, attitudes, or personality traits and (b) the item difficulty (wikipedia.org).

The webinar was moderated by Mr. Jabez Joshua Flores, Research Assistant for Diploma in Mathematics Teaching Program, Faculty of Education. He also facilitated the Q&A part of the webinar while Dr. Myra Oruga, Assistant to the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs for Research and Publications gave the synthesis of the talk and closing remarks. The first Research Conversations webinar series for the year 2021 was headed by the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dr. Melinda F. Lumanta and the Dean of the Faculty of Education, Dr. Ricardo T. Bagarinao.