Jihyun Lee

Jihyun Lee is an A/Professor of Educational Assessment and Measurement at the School of Education, UNSW-Sydney, Australia. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Measurement and Applied Statistics from the Columbian University in New York (2003) and a Master of Education in Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), Princeton, New Jersey (2004-2006) and continued to work at the ETS in a few different roles. Her main work at ETS was about development of and research in the non-cognitive assessments for large-scale, national and international programs such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). During her time at the ETS, she served as an ETS liaison to the U.S. federal government bureau, the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) within the U.S. Department of Education. Before joining the UNSW in 213, she also worked at the National Institute of Education in Singapore (2010-2012). More recently, she was a visiting academic researcher at The IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) Data Processing and Research Center (DPC) in Hamburg, Germany (September – October, 2017), a visiting Scholar at the Collingwood College, Durham University, United Kingdom (September, 2017), and a visiting Associate Professor in the School of Education in the Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea (May – December 2017). She is currently a Thomas J. Alexander (TJA) Research Fellow at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, France.

Jihyun’s main interest lies in research in supporting the large-scale, non-cognitive assessment development, which requires the expert knowledge across measurement, assessment, survey design, quantitative research methodology, educational psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and comparative education. In her 15-years of post-PhD career and professional services in the US, Singapore, South Korea, and Australia, she has developed numerous questionnaires and survey instruments. Substantively, she investigates theoretical and practical utility of education-related psychological constructs (such as interest, confidence, attitudes, self-belief, self-efficacy, and anxiety) in the context of student achievement in reading, writing and mathematics. Her major publications have demonstrated the value addedness of non-cognitive assessment above and beyond cognitive assessment; identification of the best non-cognitive predictors of student achievement; validating theoretical frameworks for psychological structure of non-cognitive constructs; developing new methodologies for assessing non-cognitive constructs; and improvement of psychometric properties of non-cognitive constructs in the context of the large-scale assessments and in cross-national assessments.