National Academy for Educational Research

　　Ming-Hsueh Tsai is currently an associate research fellow at the Research Center for Testing and Assessment of the National Academy for Educational Research, which is a joint appointment with the Research Center for Indigenous Education. Tsai was assistant research fellow and associate research fellow at the Research Center for Education Systems and Policy, a member of the Ministry of Education’s 12-year basic education development group, an advisory committee member on school research and development at National Taipei University of Education, an advisory committee member on curriculum development at the General Education Center of Chung Yuan Christian University, and a school evaluation committee member of elementary and junior high schools in New Taipei City.

Tsai’s research from 2010 to 2014 focused on proposing policy improvement suggestions to the Ministry of Education by analyzing public opinion on the promotion of the 12-year basic education program by using data from public opinion polls. Since 2015, his focus has shifted to the management of elementary and junior high schools and the professional development of principals. Tsai has conducted research to determine related influential factors using statistical techniques such as structural equation modeling and machine learning. Relevant research outcomes have been published in various journals and have been discussed at conferences. In 2015, Tsai began to work with Academia Sinica and National Tsing Hua University in co-developing artificial intelligence for education purposes; an automatic oral evaluation system funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology is under development, and the preliminary results obtained have been published in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

Since 2016, Tsai’s main research focus has shifted again to the development of student data exchange formats and systems for senior high school level students or below, with the aim of providing national educational statistics and policy analyses for the Ministry of Education.

In addition, Tsai was involved, by invitation, in the exam-free admission and student learning quality improvement project of the K-12 Education Administration of the Ministry of Education. Here, he assisted teachers in remote schools in developing literacy assessments and teaching methods to improve the basic learning competencies of secondary school students. The number of participating schools grew from 29 schools in 2017 to 69 in 2018, with further growth expected.