2026 Graduate Student eBoard Competition Winners
The Graduate Student eBoard Competition, hosted by the Graduate Student Issues Committee (GSIC), was designed to showcase innovative graduate research while providing participants with valuable professional development opportunities. Students presented their work through digital poster displays (“eBoards”), allowing them to visually communicate their research and engage directly with judges and attendees.
While many students submitted proposals and presented their work at the NCME Annual Meeting, only a select group representing over 20 institutions nationwide were chosen to participate in the competition based on their reviewers’ scores. The competition was organized into five sessions, during which judges were assigned to presentations and evaluated students using a standardized rubric to ensure fair and consistent assessment across disciplines. Evaluation criteria included conceptual framing and significance, methodological rigor, visual and narrative coherence, and oral communication and dialogue.
Students presented live alongside their eBoards, creating an interactive environment for discussion and feedback. Four outstanding participants were ultimately recognized with monetary awards for their work.
FIRST PLACE
Tai Sun Jeong, Validating a Behavioral Measure of Test-taking Engagement: A Latent Regression Approach
Tai Sun Jeong is a Ph.D. student in the Quantitative Methods program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His current research primarily focuses on test security, aberrant test-taking behaviors, and process data analytics. Before joining UW–Madison, he earned his master’s degree from the Korea National University of Education and gained professional experience at the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation.
Second PLACE
Laura Pires Gifford, Spatial Methods for Understanding Academic Proficiency from an Ecological Perspective
Laura Pires Gifford is a doctoral student in Educational Psychology and Research Methodology at Washington State University. Her research focuses on educational and psychological measurement and is guided by questions of fairness and equity in the interpretation and use of assessment results. Her recent work uses spatial analysis methods to examine how associations between community conditions and academic performance vary across geographic areas, reflecting a broader interest in understanding students’ educational outcomes in relation to the communities and contexts in which they live and learn.
Third PLACE
Jing Huang, Adaptive CUSUM Charts for Real-Time Detection of Item Parameter Drift in CD-CAT
Jing Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in Educational Psychology and Research Methodology at Purdue University, advised by Professor Hua-Hua Chang, and is concurrently completing an M.S. in Statistics. Her research lies at the intersection of computerized adaptive testing, process data analytics, and generative AI in educational measurement. She is particularly interested in developing human-centered, psychometrically rigorous assessment systems that improve measurement precision and support learning.
Fourth PLACE
YunHang Yin, Double trouble: Assessing RMSEA When Jointly Handling Non-normality and Missing Data
Yunhang Yin is a Ph.D. candidate in the quantitative psychology program at the University of South Carolina and will graduate in May 2026. His research focuses on structural equation modeling, particularly model fit assessment under challenging data conditions such as non-normality, missing data, and ordinal indicators. He aims to develop rigorous methodological tools and make advanced statistical methods more accessible to applied researchers.
