Newswise — WASHINGTON, D.C., June 4, 2014 ─ The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has named Daniel McCaffrey and Li Cai as the new editors for the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics (JEBS). McCaffrey and Cai will begin reviewing manuscripts on July 1, 2014, and will become editors of record for a three-year term beginning in January 2015.

Cosponsored by AERA and the American Statistical Association, JEBS provides an outlet for research papers that develop original statistical methods useful for the applied statistician working in educational or behavioral research.

Daniel McCaffrey is a principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service. He is a founding co-editor of Statistics and Public Policy, a new online journal of the American Statistical Association. Previously, he was an associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. He has also been a member of several scientific review panels at the Institute of Education Statistics and the National Institutes of Health and has reviewed proposals for the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Li Cai is a faculty member in the advanced quantitative methodology program at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he also serves as co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. In addition, he is affiliated with the UCLA Department of Psychology in the quantitative area. His methodological research agenda involves the development, integration, and evaluation of innovative latent variable models, as well as computational algorithms and software implementations that have wide-ranging applications in educational assessment and evaluation, psychological measurement, and health-related domains of study.

“We are honored to be the next editorial leaders of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics,” said McCaffrey and Cai. “We will maintain and grow JEBS as the first choice of methodologists across the education and behavioral sciences by publishing papers on emerging topics that will help drive research in these fields. This approach will ensure JEBS continues to lead the methodological research agenda.”

McCaffrey and Cai will assume the editorship currently held by Matthew Johnson, associate professor of statistics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Sandip Sinharay, chief research statistician at CTB/McGraw-Hill.

About AERA

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest national professional organization devoted to the scientific study of education. Founded in 1916, AERA advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education, and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good. Find AERA on Facebook and Twitter.

This release is available online.

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