Professor Shin Hyo-jeong of the Department of Educational Culture of the College of Humanities

Selected as IEA Large-Scale Research Project Leader

- Develop an automatic scoring system for supply-type questions

using PIRLS data and examine the equity and effectiveness of the automatic scoring algorithm -

- Receive KRW 140 million research grant for one year and conduct joint research with DIPF in Germany -

Professor Shin Hyo-jeong of the Department of Educational Culture of the College of Humanities was selected as the head of large-scale research of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in the Netherlands. She will serve as the adviser and receive research grants from the OECD and the ETS.

Professor Shin and the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education (DIPF) in Germany will conduct joint research called 'Automatic Scoring of Text Responses in Multilingual Assessment Data' through a research grant of KRW 140 million for one year. This is one of the six final research projects, to which many researchers worldwide had applied. The study aims to develop a system that automatically scores students’ responses to supply-type (subjective) questions and to examine the equity and effectiveness of the automatic scoring algorithm. It will use data of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), an international academic achievement assessment, collected in fourteen countries. (IEA announcement page: https://www.iea.nl/news-events/news/rd-call-ii-awardees)

“In the field of education, there is increasing interest in the technique of automatically scoring students’ essays and subjective responses based on natural language processing,” said Professor Shin. “It is important to examine the feasibility of automatic scoring techniques that can be applied to different languages, using the data collected from international academic achievement tests, for the educational application of AI, which has been actively introduced in the educational field,” she added. “It is also important to consider the equity of the algorithm, especially when it is used in actual scoring situations.

After joining the Department of Educational Culture of the College of Humanities and the Graduate School of Education this September, Professor Shin was also invited to a group of computer-adaptive test design experts at the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international academic achievement test supervised by the OECD. By March 2023, she will receive the research grant of KRW 15 million, and is currently conducting joint research on the robustness and future development of the PISA computer-adaptive test with other researchers around the world. The research results will be announced in a presentation for representatives from 80 countries that are joining the PISA and in international academic journals.

In addition, Professor Shin is an adviser to every level, from PISA 2022 data analysis to the publication of public data conducted by the ETS. She is also leading research titled 'Calculation of Creative Thinking Achievement Scores' and 'Development of Assessment Tool to Measure Non-Cognitive Psychological Constructs' with a sizeable research grant of KRW 80 million by the end of 2023.