PhD student Ziwei Zhang receives Student Paper Award from AERA Educational Statisticians SIG

Ziwei Zhang, a PhD student in the Department of Educational Psychology's quantitative methods in education (QME) program, has been given the Student Paper Award for the paper, "Assessing Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Bayesian Growth Mixture Mediation Models," by the Educational Statisticians SIG of the American Educational Research Association (AERA. Zhang collaborated with Drs. Nidhi Kohli from QME and Eric F. Lock from the UMN Division of Biostatistics & Health Data Science in the School of Public Health in this project.

The paper explores heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) in educational and psychological intervention studies, where different subgroups of participants respond differently to the same intervention. Zhang and colleagues developed statistical models to examine HTEs within the framework of longitudinal mediation analysis. Their proposed models enable researchers and practitioners to simultaneously estimate HTEs and mediation relationships over time, identifying which subgroups respond effectively to the intervention while accounting for mediation mechanisms. This is crucial for providing insights into personalized care, as it helps uncover how an intervention works through a mediation procedure and facilitates the tailoring of effective interventions for specific subgroups, potentially saving both time and resources.

The AERA is a national research society that encourages educational research and scholarly inquiry. There are 12 major divisions of AERA and many additional Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that provide educators and researchers a space to focus on specific educational interests. The Educational Statisticians SIG provided Zhang with the award.

Congratulations, Ziwei!