Athens, Ga. – Lesa Hoffman, a psychologist and quantitative methodologist will speak at the University of Georgia on Tuesday, March 16 in the College of Education’s Invited Scholars Series on Research.
Hoffman, a professor of psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will deliver a presentation titled, “An Introduction to Growth Curve Modeling in Educational Research via Multilevel Models,” from 10 a.m. to noon in Room G-23, Aderhold Hall.
Growth modeling has become increasingly more important in education at the state and federal level. For instance, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization will go to the House and Senate for vote next fall. Proposed legislation will require states to measure adequate yearly progress for each student on the basis of state-developed growth formulas that calculate growth in individual student achievement from year to year. Therefore, growth curve modeling will be required at the local, state and national levels to measure achievement growth.
Hoffman will demonstrate how multilevel models build on familiar regression and analysis of variance models and provide many advantages for analyzing longitudinal data. These include the use of all available observations (rather than deletion of persons with missing data), flexibility in modeling variances over time, and the possibility of examining the effects of predictors at any level of analysis (across occasions, persons or schools).
Hoffman joined the faculty in the department of psychology at UN-L in 2006.She received her Ph.D.in cognitive and quantitative psychology from the University of Kansas in 2003 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Penn State University.
