SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, November 8, 2019, Dr. Hyun-jeong Cho has been included in Marquis Who’s Who. As in all Marquis Who’s Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as noteworthy early career accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Dr. Cho is recognized for her creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and strong work and ethic. After receiving her Doctoral degree in Special Education from the University of Kansas (#1 special education program in the United States), Dr. Cho became a research associate with the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation and Center for Research on Learning at University of Kansas. She conducted research on promoting equity for struggling learners with and without disabilities from socioeconomically disadvantaged groups in educational policy, self-determination, reading instruction, and consequence validity of accommodation in large scale assessment. In addition, Dr. Cho worked with both teacher candidates and in-service teachers in special education and general education rooted in Evidence Based Practice (e.g. Cognitive Load Theory) and cognitive psychology at the University of Kansas and Western Michigan University.
Dr. Cho’s early professional works, research accomplishments, and publications prove her creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. Dr. Cho developed a focused program of publishable research and published this research in high-quality journals. She came to the United States to study self-determination at the University of Kansas after realizing that self-determination is one of the most important life skills for individuals with disabilities, especially since individuals with disabilities may not have the opportunities that others take for granted. Instead of taking the route expected of someone with blindness, she enrolled in a Masters program in Transition, completed it within three semesters, and then completed her doctoral program in self-determination with an emphasis on significant cognitive disabilities under Dr. Michael Wehmeyer. Immediately prior to graduation, she was offered (and accepted) a position as the first post-doctoral research associate with the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation (CETE) under Dr. Neal Kingston (Director). She was promoted to the position of research associate a year later. At CETE, she conducted research on issues of large scale assessment for projects involving students with mild, moderate, and significant cognitive disabilities in general education assessment and alternate assessments-modified achievement standards, Alternate Assessment-Alternate Achievement Standards, and special education policy. These are areas she was not exposed to during her doctoral program, but with hard work at CETE, she was within her first four months able to produce an important paper which was published in Exceptional Children. In, the following years, she produced follow-up articles for the Social Science Citation Index. She served Journals accredited by the Social Science Citation Index as a guest peer-reviewer and evaluated manuscripts which dealt with leveling the playing field in accordance with Section 504 and Titles II and III of the Americans with Disabilities Amendment Act (2009; 2015). Dr. Cho sought and obtained extramural funding to support her scholarly efforts. One of her primary duties was to write grant proposals and apply for federal funding. Throughout the grant proposal process, she worked with professionals from several different disciplines, including computer sciences, quantitative psychology, and developmental psychology. Her first IES grant proposal was about the relations between self-determination, school engagement, and Reading academic performance scores. In this grant proposal, she employed Self-Determination Theory, since the existing self-determination construct cannot measure the quality of self-determination. She worked with Dr. Edward Deci, who is the creator of the Self-Determination Theory. Also, her second IES grant was formed to help Individualized Education Program (IEP) teams support appropriate test-type assignments. Dr. Cho collaborated with experts from computer science and measurement areas, formulating a new system of item categorization and features for large-scale math assessment that she produced in “Examining the Effectiveness of Test Accommodation Using DIF and a Mixture IRT Model”, Journal of Applied Measure in Education, and she developed the interview questionnaires and instruments through a pilot study and focus group with her students. For spiritual reasons, she began online religious study while holding an adjunct professorship in Michigan. This includes an online and hibernate teaching position with Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan for two years.
Dr. Cho was a foreign exchange student at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, from 1999 to 2000. She earned two Bachelor of Education degrees in Special and English Education from Daegu University in 2002. She then relocated to the United States to attend the University of Kansas, where she obtained a Master of Education in 2005 and a Doctor of Education in 2010, both in special education. In her native country of Korea, she is a licensed English teacher for grades K-12 and a licensed special education teacher in cross-categorical disabilities for grades 6-12. She has also served as a volunteer tutor at a number of institutions including the Salvation Army Orphanage, the Ma-po Library, Bo-myung Special Education School, Kwang-myung Special Education School, and Moo-hak Middle School.
In conjunction with her professional roles, Dr. Cho has served as co-editor of the Asian Pacific Journal of Intellectual Disabilities since 2013 and a guest manuscript reviewer for several professional journals since 2011. She also authored one chapter in the book “Virtual Environment in Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Handbook for Parents and Professionals” in 2007, and has contributed numerous peer-reviewed and web-based articles to publications. She is a member of many organizations within her field that include the American Education Research Association, the Council for Exceptional Children, TASH, and ResearchGate.
In 1998, Dr. Cho was awarded the Jang-sool Park Scholarship and the Exchange Student Scholarship from Daegu University. She also received the Grace M. Phinney Scholarship from the School of Education at the University of Kansas from 2005 to 2009. She was an invited panelist at the forum on “Accommodations in the 21st Century: Critical Considerations for Students with Disabilities” in 2011.
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