Speaker

Dr. Minjeong Jeon
Department of Education
University of Los Angeles, California

Minjeong Jeon, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Advanced Quantitative Methods in the UCLA Department Education. Dr. Jeon received her Ph.D in Quantitative Methods from UC Berkeley. Before joining UCLA faculty, she was an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Psychology at Ohio State University. Her research revolves around developing, applying, and estimating latent variable models for studying measurement and growth. Her recent research topics include latent space modeling, process modeling, and joint analysis.

Title

Mapping item-response interactions: A latent space approach to item response data with interaction maps

Abstract

In this talk, I introduce a novel latent space modeling approach to psychological assessment data. In this approach, respondents’ binary responses to test items are viewed as a bipartite network between respondents and items where a tie is made when a respondent gives a correct (or positive) answer to an item. The resulting latent space model provides a window into respondents’ performance on the assessment, placing respondents and test items in a shared metric space referred to as an interaction map. The interaction map approach can help assess students’ strengths and weaknesses from cognitive assessment and identify patients’ symptom profiles from clinical assessment data. I will illustrate the utilities of the proposed approach, focusing on how the interaction map can help derive insightful diagnostic information on items and respondents.