“Inequities and byproducts of classism and racism are likely to be heightened during a global pandemic,” Iloh said. ​

Iloh will examine college-going for low-income Black and Latinx students at institutions during COVID-19. In doing so, she will utilize her Iloh Model of College-Going Decisions and Trajectories to examine how the three bi-directional contexts of her framework inform extant college pathways. By intentionally focusing on COVID-19 narratives hidden in plain sight, she seeks to identify class and race-minded understandings and approaches for this moment, especially as it pertains to college access and persistence. 

“The Iloh Model of College-Going Decisions and Trajectories - incorporating information, time, and opportunity - is especially attentive to this historical moment that can complicate already complex college-going realities,” Iloh said.
​
Iloh is an anthropologist who studies educational equity, educational stratification, and institutional behavior. Her program of research focuses on college access and “choice,” institutional culture, and the social context of education across the P-20 pipeline.

“My research is an acknowledgement that minoritized students are important experts of experiences that must be consistently amplified and woven into policies and practices,” Iloh said. “I'm humbled to use my model for a study that explores the troubling moment we are in for the very communities that drew me to the study of education. This is the work that keeps my mind racing and makes me so honored to be a social scientist.”

Iloh was honored as a “30 Under 30” by Forbes in 2016 and has been described as a “higher education powerhouse” by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. Iloh has been invited to share her expertise with the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, the Community College League of California, the Institute of Higher Education, Michelle Obama’s Reach Higher Campaign, Telemundo, and NBC Universal.

Dowell’s research foci include learning analytics, computer-mediated collaborative interaction, and computational linguistics. She is the director of the School of Education’s LA-Lab, which includes researchers with backgrounds in cognitive science, information, psychology, and statistics. The lab takes a multi-disciplinary approach that builds on theories and methods in the learning sciences, cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, and computational social sciences. The team has recently started to explore issues around inclusivity and equity in online STEM collaborative interactions.

“The learning engineers post-doctoral fellows will work on a project that is focused on improving learning outcomes for students who are under-represented in STEM,” Dowell said. “In particular, the fellow will engage in the next stage of this research, which will use artificial intelligence approaches to provide real-time, personalized feedback to students to mitigate these issues.”

The ​UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence awarded Associate Professor June Ahn (pictured left), Professor Rossella Santagata (pictured center), and Assistant Professor Adriana Villavicencio (pictured right) a grant to research opportunities to advance equity during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The grant - Reimagining Educational Equity and Opportunity (REEO) during the COVID 19 Pandemic - will document and synthesize the nuanced approaches that different communities are taking to best support students in Orange County schools during this unique time, and provide targeted support in areas of need through the creation of a Networked Improvement Community composed of UCI School of Education researchers and school and district leaders and community members.

“In this project, we are deepening the relationships we have built between researchers and school partners through the OCEAN network to document the unique challenges and ways that our partners have dealt with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” Ahn said. “But beyond just conducting research, the grant funds will allow us to convene focused working groups of educators and researchers to figure out how to best serve students in the coming months of the pandemic, with a key focus on equity and serving those most in need.”

The Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN) is a series of partnerships between K-12 schools and the UCI School of Education. At each site, a School of Education faculty member and doctoral student work with school leadership to identify the greatest needs and goals of the school, and in turn conduct research that will positively impact the school. Learn more about OCEAN, which launched in 2018, here.

Ahn studies learning technologies, research-practice partnerships, human-computer interaction, educational technology, and data use and analytics.​ His core research interest is understanding how technology and information can enhance the way we learn and deliver education. He also serves as faculty director for OCEAN.

Santagata’s research interests include teacher preparation and professional development, teaching and learning in STEM fields, video technologies, teaching and learning as cultural practices, and equity and education. She is founding faculty and director of the Education Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice and the School of Education’s Global Engagement Liaison

Villavicencio focuses her research on urban education, educational equity for marginalized communities, research-practice partnerships, and program evaluation. She is currently conducting a three-year mixed-method study on schools that serve recently arrived immigrant youth and an evaluation of an anti-racist teacher training program embedded in culturally diverse elementary schools.
​
The grant is part of the Office of Inclusive Excellence's Confronting Extremism program, which aims to fortify resilience of the campus community while advancing commitments among UCI members to inclusive excellence.

Kim has previously observed that curriculum in schools tends not to systematically address language development, and many teachers do not receive sufficient training and support for teaching language skills.
​
“I have long been committed to improving children’s language and literacy outcomes,” Kim said. “I am thrilled about the opportunity to work on something that will be useful for and have a direct impact on student learning. Materials from this project will be useful resources for teachers and have a real impact on children.”

​

​The publication was borne out of data Kang collected while a doctoral student at Michigan State University. During the project, Kang shadowed a group of seventh- and eighth-grade girls at an urban middle school for one year. She found that the Black students’ discourse and attitude toward science dramatically changed over the course of just one year. Their brilliant ideas and rich experiences outside the classrooms were not leveraged, their peers did not recognize them as capable of doing the work, and support was not provided. 

​“That still resonates with me today,” Kang said. “Before that, I was looking at the teacher’s perspective, but after that I learned how difficult it is for marginalized students to navigate spaces, and I began looking at problems from both a teacher and student perspective.”

Read the full article here.

Kang’s research explores the design and impact of innovations that support early career teachers' learning of equitable science teaching. In her study of youth's engagement and identities in science, she focuses on girls from non-dominant linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

​

In 1990, Farkas invented Reading One-to-One, a tutoring program in which college students tutor first and second graders who have fallen behind in reading. The program was an impetus for President Clinton’s America Reads, which encourages college work study students to tutor in local school districts.

Programs based on this model continue today in hundreds of colleges and universities, including UCI.

“If we wish to reduce the inheritance of inequality, we must intervene forcefully near the beginning of schooling. This need has guided, and will continue to guide, my work.”

Farkas has authored or co-authored four books and more than 125 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Collectively, his work has been cited more than 14,000 times. His publications indicate the range of his research expertise: special education needs and consequences, pre-school readiness, disparities and impacts of child care, children’s growth trajectories in reading, math, and science, and early interventions for students who have fallen behind in reading.

Farkas’s research has been supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, The Spencer Foundation, The American Educational Research Association, The Corporation for National Service, The National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, The National Science Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Labor.

Currently, Farkas is Co-PI on a two-year USDE Institute of Education Sciences grant to continue his study of the effects of racial and ethnic disproportionality in K-12 special educational placement on educational outcomes. Farkas previously found that once students with similar needs (measured by reading and math test scores) for special education services are compared, nonwhite students have much lower special education placement rates than white students. He and principal investigator Paul L. Morgan, Professor, Penn State University, will now be expanding this research to examine over time trends in this phenomenon, as well as the effects of special education on student outcomes. 

Farkas was elected to the Sociological Research Association in 1996 and served as president in 2010. He was the editor of the Rose Monograph Series of the American Sociological Association from 1996 to 1999 and served on the ASA’s publications committee at that time. He has served on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, Social Science Research, Evaluation Review, the American Journal of Education, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. In 2009, the American Educational Research Association elected Farkas as a fellow.



In 2018, the University of California, Irvine named Farkas a distinguished professor - reserved for faculty who have achieved the highest levels of scholarship over the course of their careers.

The theme of this year’s ASA annual meeting is “Power, Inequality, and Resistance at Work.”  More information, including registration, can be found here.
 
About the Willard Waller Award

Willard Walter Waller (1899–1945) was an American sociologist recognized as one of the most prominent scholars in the field of sociology. His work, The Sociology of Teaching (1932), is considered an "early classic" in the field of the sociology of education. His research spanned the sociology of the family, of education, and of the military. Read more here: 

Morales-Garcia's career goal is to effectively advocate for and inform evidence-based family policies as a means to lessen-poverty related disparities in child development outcomes, with a focus on Latinx families. ​

For her dissertation, Rivas is researching how to improve college success among underrepresented college students in STEM courses and focusing on low-cost interventions that can help all students succeed, through study skills training and formative assessment using interactive response systems. ​​Soto-Lara's research focuses on educational trajectories of underrepresented youth.