Free Workshops Offered This Week on Communicating With Public About Research

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Brian Leventhal

Faculty and students interested in learning how to better communicate with the public about their research are invited to attend workshops on Thursday and Friday.

The two events are hosted by the Educational Statistics and Research Methods program in the department of Rehabilitation, Human Resources and Communication Disorders.

"These two workshops are being facilitated by a visiting scholar from James Madison University, Brian Leventhal, and one of his graduate students, Nikole Gregg, along with UA faculty member Allison Ames," said Michael Hevel, head of the Rehabilitation, Human Resources, and Communication Disorders department at UA. "The two workshops are essentially advance screenings of workshops that will be conducted at the upcoming concurrent AERA and NCME conferences in Toronto, which are the largest education research conferences in the world. We are excited to offer these workshops to University of Arkansas faculty and students free of charge."

Allison Ames, an assistant professor in the Educational Statistics and Research Methods program, adds, "The theme of the 2019 NCME annual conference is 'Communicating with the Public about Educational Measurement,' which fits in perfectly with the two workshops."

Leventhal and Gregg will provide best practices for data visualization and translating research results into high-quality visual displays during the first workshop. For those interested in measurement of constructs and analysis of surveys and assessments, Ames will join Leventhal to train participants in item response theory simulation studies in the second workshop.

"Simulations are critical to our understanding of measurement models and there are very few resources for researchers on how to conduct a simulation," Ames said. "We developed this workshop to bridge that gap."

The first workshop, titled "Tips and Tricks to Effectively Communicate Results: Best Practices in Data Visualization" will be on Thursday, March 28, will be from 12:30-4:30 p.m. in the Graduate Education building, room 343. Find out more about the workshop and RSVP.

The second workshop, titled "Using SAS for Monte Carlo Simulation Studies in Item Response Theory" will be on Friday, March 29, from 8 a.m. to noon, in the Graduate Education building, room 343. Find out more about the workshop and RSVP.

Space is limited to the first 50 RSVPs in each workshop.