This year, the Richard M. Wolf Memorial Award for an outstanding paper goes to Ms. Natalia López-Hornickel. The Bruce H. Choppin Memorial Awards goes to both Ms. Lene Nors Nielsen for an outstanding master’s theses, and to Dr. Dihao Leng for an outstanding doctoral dissertation.
Ms. Natalia López-Hornickel received the Richard M. Wolf Memorial Award for her paper “It is not just your opinion: Gender equity endorsement of Latin American students and their peers at school”. In her paper, Ms. López-Hornickel examined what shapes young people’s attitudes toward gender equity across five Latin American countries: Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Peru. Drawing on data from the Latin American module of ICCS 2016, the outstanding paper explores how civic learning, school climate, and ideological beliefs are associated with whether students support equal rights for men and women.
Natalia López-Hornickel is a PhD candidate in Advanced Quantitative Methods at the University of Bath, funded by the South-West Doctoral Training Partnership (ESRC), and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Roehampton.
Ms. Lene Nors Nielsen received the Bruce H. Choppin Memorial for her master’s thesis “The effect of gender equality on gender differences in TIMSS data: A pseudo panel approach”. Utilizing open-access data from TIMSS 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019, Ms. Nors Nielsen’s work investigated how national-level socioeconomic factors - particularly gender equality - relate to gender differences in student achievement in mathematics and science.
Lene Nors Nielsen earned a Master’s degree in Educational Sociology from the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University in 2024. She was part of the team responsible for coordinating data collection in Danish schools for both TIMSS 2023 and ICILS 2023, and currently works with the Municipality of Copenhagen as a data and analysis consultant.
Dr. Dihao Leng received the Bruce H. Choppin Memorial for her doctoral dissertation “Does Process Data Add Value to the Analysis of International Large-Scale Assessment Data?”. The honored work approached the titular question through three studies using anonymized process data. The first study used TIMSS 2019 data from 10 countries to understand gender differences in test-taking behavior, and their relationships with mathematics achievement. The second study focused on methodological improvements for achievement estimation in ILSAs; a new approach incorporating process variables into latent regression models and using variable selection techniques for dimension reduction. The third study used data from four countries from PIRLS 2021 to investigate gender differences in reading in the context of girls consistently outperforming boys on average across countries and assessment cycles.
Presenting on her dissertation at the 2025 IEA General Assembly, Dr. Leng noted:
"Process data offers unique insights beyond what achievement and traditional background variables can provide."
Dr. Dihao Leng earned her PhD in Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment from Boston College and previously interned at the Graduate Management Admission Council. She is a Senior Research Specialist at the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College, specializing in advanced statistics, psychometrics, and AI applications.
To find out more, see the IEA Insider article on the IEA Research Award Winners.
Established to commemorate the contributions Bruce H. Choppin and Richard M. Wolf made to IEA, the IEA Research Awards are held annually to recognize high-quality research that makes use of IEA data. The deadline for applications is 31 March each year; applications should be submitted to secretariat@iea.nl. More information is available here.