Dr Celeste Combrinck, from Science Mathematics and Technology Education department, is the first recipient of the WERA Visiting Researcher Award. The award is a joint collaboration by the World Education Research Association (WERA) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) to contribute to the advancement of educational research.

The WERA-IEA-DiVER award offers academics the opportunity to visit the IEA Research and Analysis (RandA) Unit in Hamburg and the Diversity in Education Research Lab (DiVER) at the University of Hamburg.  Visiting researchers will have the opportunity to develop their own research project while benefiting from the individual support of IEA and DiVER Hamburg experts working in different fields related to international large-scale assessments, especially with a focus on diversity in education. The award committee had a strong and large application pool, which made the selection task particularly challenging.

Dr Combrinck will work on data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), with the aim to devise models which make heterogeneous samples more comparable. The intended aim is to examine how can provincial achievement be weighted or modelled for more accurate interpretation of results.