Dr. Jianjun "JJ" Wang

Professor (1993 - present)
Faculty Ombuds (8/20/2023 - 12/1/2025)

Welcome to my professional website. Since 1993, I have taught statistics and research design to undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students at California State University, Bakersfield, helping them move from learning statistical procedures to conducting and communicating their own research. My research in messy data analysis, stochastic modeling, R computing, AI applications, network analysis, and STEM education informs that teaching. I also care deeply about our campus community and, through attentive listening and informal mediation, I have been committed to fostering a supportive environment where all colleagues can thrive.

Contact Me

Explore my teaching philosophy: A podcast conversation

Dr. Jianjun Wang

Teaching at a Glance

  • 33 years at CSUB (since 1993) teaching statistics and research design at the undergraduate, master's, and doctoral levels, plus doctoral courses for the University of the Pacific and CSU Fresno. (Sample syllabus)
  • Cloud-based SAS computing environment that removed software-cost and installation barriers for students, recognized by the CSU Chancellor's Office with the inaugural Faculty Innovation and Leadership Award (2018).
  • Course quality and accessibility: four external Quality Matters course reviews, each earning the maximum score available under its rubric (1, 2, 3, 4); Quality Matters certification trainer for CSUB's Teaching and Learning Center (video); Fall 2026 UDOIT reports show 100% accessibility scores for three Canvas courses (1, 2, 3).
  • Students and mentoring: student evaluations, 2021–2026; dissertation chairing; former students as coauthors of peer-reviewed articles and conference presentations; former students' testimonies (1, 2).

Teaching Philosophy in Conversation

Relentless Serving and Learning

Teaching in Higher Ed · Episode 265 ·

In this conversation with Bonni Stachowiak, I discuss three barriers I worked to remove for students in research-design and statistics courses: (1) the cost of proprietary software, (2) time-limited access that prevents later professional use, and (3) installation friction that especially burdens first-generation students. The solution centers on a perpetual, cloud-based SAS Studio environment together with decision-support tables that embed step-by-step how-to videos.

Listen to the interview and read the English transcript

About Me

Background

During my tenure at CSUB, I chaired the Department of Advanced Educational Studies (which housed six graduate programs) from 2002 to 2008. Before that, I received early promotions to Associate Professor (1997) and Full Professor (2000), along with early tenure in 1998.

For the remainder of my time at CSUB, I taught undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral courses. I also participated in a cooperative doctoral program between CSUB and the University of the Pacific, and served as a major professor chairing doctoral dissertations at CSU Fresno. In 2009, I took a leave to serve as a Senior Research Scientist at The Corporation for Standards and Outcomes, a company of The First Lab.

Institutional Services:

(1) CAEP Assessment Reviewer
(2) NCATE Board of Examiner
(3) Advisory Board of the Australian International Academic Center (AIAC)

Academic Credentials

Ph.D. in Science Education

Kansas State University (KSU)

Advisor: Dr. John Staver at Purdue

Thesis Link (Wang, 1993)

Ph.D. Coursework in Statistics

KSU

Advisor: Dr. Feyerherm at KSU

Passed the 2nd Ph.D. Qualifying Exam in 1993

M.S. in Statistics

KSU

Thesis Link (Wang, 1993)

M.S. in Physics

Beijing Normal University

Advisor: Professor Ping Li at BNU

Thesis Link (Wang, 1987)

(more physics coursework in 1990 with Professor Itzik Ben-Itzhak at KSU)

B.S. in Physics

Hefei Normal University (formerly Anhui Teachers College)

AI Training Certificates

I completed Anthropic training in:

Advanced Data Science Credentials

Completed postdoctoral training in data science, including:

  • Bayesian Statistics
  • Categorical Data Analysis
  • Clustering Technique
  • Complex Data (Multivariate)
  • Conjoint Analysis
  • Data Science Statistical Methods
  • Design and Analysis of Probability Surveys
  • Discrete Choice Modeling
  • Enterprise Miner
  • Machine Learning
  • Multilevel & Longitudinal Modeling
  • Machine Learning Using Viya
  • Network Optimization Using Viya
  • Non-Linear Mixed Procedure
  • Poisson Regression
  • Power & Sample Size
  • Predictive Modeling
  • Python Integration
  • SAS for R User
  • SQL Essentials
  • Structural Equation Modeling
  • Survival/Hazards Modeling
  • Text Miner
  • Time Series Modeling
  • Visual Analytics
  • Visual Data Mining
  • Viya/R Integration

Fellow: National Center for Education Statistics (John Sietsema, Mentor)

Professional Experiences

Teaching

See also Teaching at a Glance and the podcast conversation Relentless Serving and Learning.

EDLD 6040: Advanced Applied Quantitative Methods

2016–present at CSUB (doctoral)

Ed.D. research workshops and statistics lab

EDRS 6600 (formerly EDRS 680): Educational Statistics

1993–present at CSUB (master's)

EDRS 6610 (formerly EDRS 681): Research Design & Analysis

1993–present at CSUB (master's)

EDRS 4600 (formerly EDRS 460): Educational Statistics

2014–present at CSUB (undergraduate)

EDL 504: Advanced Applied Quantitative Methods

2011–2013 at CSU, Fresno

EPSY 214: Intermediate Statistics

2001–2009 at the University of the Pacific

For the doctoral program in Educational Administration

EPSY 395c: Quantitative Research Design and Methods

2001–2009 at the University of the Pacific

For the doctoral program in Educational Administration

EDEL 870: Doctoral Research in Science Education

1992–1993 at KSU

Selected Publications

The Google Scholar literature base showed 196 items under my name and affiliation as of 3/15/2025. Before pursuing my Ph.D. in the United States, I served as Executive Secretary of the IEA Center in Beijing and published research articles in top scholarly journals, such as: (1) Educational Research(教育研究) (Link), volume 88(10), pp. 16–19; (2) Shanghai Educational Research (上海教育科研) (Link), volume 89(5), pp. 22–26; and (3) Foreign Educational Research(外国教育研究) (Link), volume 90(1), pp. 64–68.

My English publications since 1993 have appeared in the following journals: The American Statistician; Educational Researcher; Phi Delta Kappan; Educational and Psychological Measurement; Journal of Nursing Measurement; Social Indicators Research; Science Education; Journal of Research in Science Teaching; Journal for Research in Mathematics Education; Educational Psychology; The Journal of Educational Research; The Journal of Experimental Education; International Journal of Research & Method in Education; Evaluation and Program Planning; Mathematics Education Research Journal; International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education; School Science and Mathematics; Journal of School Leadership; Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice; Alberta Journal of Educational Research; Ambulatory Surgery; Multiple Linear Regression Viewpoints; Assessment Update; Research in the Schools; Education; Journal of Instructional Psychology; Educational Leadership and Administration; Advances in Online Education; Athens Journal of Education; Research in Middle Level Education Annual; International Journal of Education; Reading Improvement; Teacher Education & Practice; International Education Studies; The Journal of Effective Teaching; The Math-Science Connector; Journal of Research in STEM Education; Journal of Research in Science, Mathematics and Technology Education; and Journal of Social Service Research.

Featured: A Methodological Exchange on TIMSS

The Trend in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), originally the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, is a large-scale international assessment launched in 1995 and repeated every four years since. By the mid-1990s, international coordination alone had cost roughly $25–30 million over six years (Lawton, 1996), while total U.S. participation reached some $51 million (Wang, 1998), and that public commitment has continued across every subsequent cycle. An investment of this scale carries a corresponding expectation of quality from the research community.

Errors in the test instrument.

My content examination of the released test items identified scientific errors in the TIMSS instrument: items that could not serve as valid measures of student achievement in mathematics and science (Wang, 1998).

A deeper question in the analysis.

Furthermore, how should student achievement in mathematics and science be correlated when each score exists only as a set of imputed plausible values? My 2016 article with Professor Xin Ma (University of Kentucky) raised this question from TIMSS 1995 data and proposed canonical correlation analysis as a solution. It drew a full-length response from Dr. Plamen Mirazchiyski, former Deputy Head of the Research and Analysis Unit of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). Our rejoinder further documented a non-compliance with Rubin’s multiple imputation rule in the TIMSS 1995 international reports and called for increasing the number of plausible-value imputations in line with current statistical computing standards. Together, these works examined a study of extraordinary public reach—spanning more than 40 nations and three decades—from the vantage point of measurement integrity. The full record is open access:

  • Lawton, M. (1996, November 27). U.S. students about average in global study. Education Week. (Link)
  • Mirazchiyski, P. (2019). Response to “An examination of plausible score correlation from the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study.” Athens Journal of Education, 6(2), 145–158. (Link)
  • Wang, J. (1998). A content examination of the TIMSS items. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(1), 36–38. (Link)
  • Wang, J., & Ma, X. (2016). An examination of plausible score correlation from the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study. Athens Journal of Education, 3(4), 301–312. (Link)
  • Wang, J., & Ma, X. (2019). Rejoinder: Response to “An examination of plausible score correlation from the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study.” Athens Journal of Education, 6(2), 159–170. (Link)

Featured: A Threshold Correction for Social-Emotional Screening

The Ages & Stages Questionnaires: Social-Emotional, Second Edition (ASQ:SE-2) is used by pediatric nurses, school nurses, and early childhood programs in many countries to decide which young children are referred for mental health evaluation. Its published cutoff scores rise with child age, as development requires — except at 36 months, where the threshold jumps to 105 and then falls back to 85, so the same screening score can trigger a referral at 30 or 48 months but not at 36 months. My study traced this anomaly to 6,039 missing cases in the instrument’s normative sample and showed, through both nearest-neighbor imputation and a Bayesian adjustment, that a corrected cutoff score of 85 at 36 months restores the monotonic pattern required by Classical Test Theory, Item Response Theory, and the irreversible trajectory of child growth:

  • Wang, J. (2022). An examination of threshold setting in social emotional measurement. Journal of Nursing Measurement, 31(2). (Link)

Featured: Multilevel Modeling for Ambulatory Surgery Access

Ambulatory Surgery is the official clinical journal of the International Association for Ambulatory Surgery (IAAS). These two companion articles began as a single submission; at the invitation of the journal’s editor-in-chief, the work was divided into a methodology paper and an empirical paper, each advancing the analysis on a distinct front. Both confront a practical question in public health: how can access to Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs)—which account for roughly 60% of all surgical procedures—be studied rigorously when the randomized controlled trial (RCT), long held as the gold standard of medical research, cannot randomize the very forces that govern that access?

Why randomization alone falls short.

ASC access is shaped by policy and place. California’s Proposition 10 funds child health for ages 0–5 from a tobacco tax distributed to counties by birth rate, and state tax incentives steer surgeons toward Medically Underserved Areas—contextual forces that cannot be assigned at random, and that would distort the findings if treated as confounders to be balanced away. The first article makes the methodological case for multilevel modeling, using Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) data in which 1,746 California communities are naturally nested within 50 counties. Partitioning the variance confirmed significant variation at both the county (Z = 4.07, p < .0001) and community (Z = 35.27, p < .0001) levels, with an intraclass correlation of .11—direct evidence that the independent-observations assumption of a single-level model does not hold for these data.

What the merged data reveal.

The second article merges the OSHPD records with the American Community Survey and organizes the analysis through the Context–Input–Process–Product (CIPP) evaluation paradigm. Family income, population density, and the proportion of families with children under age six each exert a significant community-level effect on ASC access; county-level health-insurance coverage carries a near-medium effect size and interacts significantly with the presence of young children, so insurance protection and early-childhood support prove inseparable. The full multilevel model decisively outperformed the null model [χ²(10) = 10,565.2, p < .0001], and lower AIC and BIC values confirmed that the added structure earns its place. Together, the two studies carry public-health inquiry from “what works” toward “what works, for whom, and in what context.”

  • Wang, J., Ortiz, T., Navarro, D., Maier, R., Wang, L., & Wang, S. (2015). Methodological considerations for analyzing ambulatory service access in multilevel context. Ambulatory Surgery, 21(4), 177–180. (Link)
  • Wang, J., Ortiz, T., Navarro, D., Maier, R., Wang, L., & Wang, S. (2016). An empirical study of ambulatory surgery access in multilevel context. Ambulatory Surgery, 22(2), 74–79. (Link)

Below are some recent grant reports and journal publications:

Books

Grant Activities

Before and during my tenure as department chair, my research received funding from several organizations, including the Spencer Foundation (1994–1995), the National Science Foundation (1995–1996, 1996–1998), Carnegie Foundation/The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (2003–2005), and NAEP's Secondary Data Analysis Program (2004-2006).

Following my service as chair, I dedicated 15 years to developing comprehensive annual evaluation reports—often exceeding 140 pages—and facilitating public hearings for a First 5 project that secured over $10 million in annual funding through California's Proposition 10.

Below is a brief overview of the major grant initiatives I have participated in since 2020.

Conference Presentations

Contact

California State University, Bakersfield

jwang@csub.edu