David Kaplan

About

I am the Patricia Busk Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. My current program of research focuses on the development of Bayesian methods applied to a wide range of education research settings. My specific interests include: Bayesian model averaging; objective versus subjective Bayesian modeling; and Bayesian approaches to problems in large-scale survey methodology. My collaborative research involves applications of advanced quantitative methodologies to substantive and methodological problems in international large-scale assessments in education. I have been actively involved in the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) where I served on its Technical Advisory Group from 2005-2009 and its Questionnaire Expert Group from 2004-present where I served as the Chair of the Questionnaire Expert Group for PISA 2015 and remain a member of the Questionnaire Expert Group for PISA 2018. I also sit on the Questionnaire Expert Group for the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) as well as the Design and Analysis Committee and the Questionnaire Standing Committee for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

I have served on a number of IES and NIH Training Grants at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and as a training faculty member. I am able to mentor trainees in a wide range of statistical modeling and large-scale survey design methods. I have been actively involved with training in CDE, including teaching the ‘Summer DemSem’ course on ‘Bayesian Statistics for Social Scientists’ in May 2014 and participating in the weekly Demography Seminars (where I presented my work on missing data in October 2014, and most recently a presentation on recent developments in Bayesian Model Averaging in January 2018). I regularly teach methods courses taken by demography trainees, including Structural Equation Modeling (EP 960).

CDE research theme area affiliations

Demography of Inequality

Selected Publications

Kaplan, David. “Causal Inference with Large-Scale Assessments in Education from a Bayesian Perspective: A Review and Synthesis.” Large-scale Assessments in Education 4, no. 1 (2016): 7. PubMed Central ID 6078429.

Kaplan, David, and Jianshen Chen. “Bayesian Model Averaging for Propensity Score Analysis.” Multivariate Behavioral Research 49, no. 6 (2014): 505-17. PubMed Central ID 6070389.

van de Schoot, Rens, David Kaplan, Jaap Denissen, Jens B. Asendorpf, Franz J. Neyer, and Marcel A. G. van Aken. “A Gentle Introduction to Bayesian Analysis: Applications to Developmental Research.” Child Development 85, no. 3 (2014): 842-60. PubMed Central ID 4158865.