Sixth Doctoral Award success for student researching assessment
Katerina Young has been awarded a highly prestigious TOEFL Doctoral Grant to support her research in writing assessment, supervised by Professor Glenn Fulcher in the School of Education. Katerina is the sixth doctoral student to win a doctoral grant from Educational Testing Service (ETS) since 2012.
Based in Princeton, ETS is the largest provider of language tests in the United States and the world. A small number of doctoral grants are awarded each year to support exceptional research by doctoral students that is judged likely to have a positive impact on test development and use beyond the context in which the research is conducted.
Katerina’s research addresses critical issues of reliability and validity in the assessment of business communication for internationally transportable qualifications. The study addresses the relationship between scores from large scale English language tests compared with locally produced assessment systems (in Czechoslovakia), leading to improvements in student assessment in local contexts, and the portability of qualifications.
Katerina said: "I am very excited to have become a recipient of the TOEFL Small Grants Award in Foreign and Second Language Assessment. I am honored that a well-established institution such as ETS has found my research on local scale design relevant. Thanks to the grant and my supervisor's support in this endeavor, I will be able to reward my Prague colleagues for their time and effort and accelerate the project's successful completion."
Professor Fulcher said: "We're delighted that Katerina has been awarded this grant to support her research. The success rate of our doctoral students is a clear indication of the world class research in assessment that is going on at Leicester."
Previous winners of TOEFL Doctoral Grants supervised by Professor Fulcher are:
Jong-Il Yi awarded TOEFL grant for doctoral research 2011.
Kevin Browne awarded TOEFL grant for doctoral research 2012
Nathaniel Owen awarded TOEFL grant for doctoral research 2014
Kunlaphak Kongsuwannakul awarded TOEFL grant for doctoral research 2015