Yasmine El Masri is a Research Fellow at OUCEA and a Hulme Junior Research Fellow in Educational Assessment at Brasenose College. She has been appointed by Ofqual as an External Assessment Specialist and by Qualification Wales as an Assessment Expert Advisor.
Yasmine completed her DPhil in Education at OUCEA in 2015. Her doctoral thesis examined the impact of language on the difficulty of PISA science tests across UK, France and Jordan using different psychometric and statistical techniques including Rasch modelling and differential item functioning (DIF). In 2014, Yasmine received Kathleen Tattersall New Researcher Award from the Association for Education Assessment- Europe (AEA-Europe).
Before coming to Oxford, Yasmine was a science teacher in secondary schools in Beirut and Abu Dhabi. In addition to her DPhil degree from Oxford, Yasmine holds a Master of Arts in Science Education, a Teaching Diploma for teaching science in secondary schools and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the American University of Beirut (AUB).
Yasmine led various externally funded projects, including a one-year ESRC GCRF Fellowship in 2017, during which she collaborated with a local NGO in Lebanon producing open source interactive science tasks in multiple languages for underprivileged students in the country, including Syrian refugees. She is currently leading a study within Project Calibrate, a three-year project funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Gatsby Foundation aiming to enhance summative assessments of practical science in England. She is also a co-investigator and a project manager of a project funded by the International Baccalaureate Organization focused on Critical Thinking in the Diploma Programme.
Research Interests
Item difficulty and demands, language in assessment, science assessments, international large-scale assessments, critical thinking, comparability of assessments across cultures