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Santa Ana High School's Bridge to Employment (BTE), a collaboration between the high school, UCI's Center for Educational Partnerships, ASP, and Johnson & Johnson, enabled two Santa Ana High School students to traveled to Portugal October 6-9 as Student Ambassadors to Johnson & Johnson's annual Alliance Building and Training Session (ABTS). Selected from a highly competitive pool of hundreds of applicants, Anthony Camacho and Elizabeth Cortez Garcia were accompanied to Portugal by CFEP's Early Academic Outreach Program Director Ashley Cheri. Once in country, Anthony and Elizabeth spent three days interacting with business representatives, higher education partners, educators, and intermediaries from around the world learning about model programs and what communities can do to provide academic enrichment opportunities, facilitate career exploration, and prepare students for higher education. Their activities included informing the 70+ attendees about their local BTE activities, developing and presenting a team-based STEM2D Ignite Activity, and earning an Intercultural Fluency Digital Badge. At program completion, the Santa Ana students were praised for their engagement and their contributions: "Anthony and Elizabeth demonstrated exceptional teamwork, leadership, problem-solving abilities, communication skills, cultural awareness, and kindness in working with students from around the world. They are stellar examples of what Johnson & Johnson’s BTE program strives to achieve (Johnson & Johnson)." Launched in 1992, Bridge to Employment (BTE) is a Johnson & Johnson initiative that prepares youth for brighter futures. Johnson & Johnson partners with FHI 360’s National Institute for Work and Learning (NIWL) to manage the global BTE initiative. The School of Education's Center for Educational Partnerships (CFEP) creates collaborations that support preparation for and success in higher education with a focus is on equity and access for all students
Reich & Diaz Present at International Conference of Community Psychology, Santiago, Chile10/19/2018
Associate Professor Stephanie Reich and Postdoctoral Researcher Guadalupe Diaz presented their research at the 7th International Conference of Community Psychology, held October 5-7 in Santiago de Chile. The central theme of the Conference emphasized the exchange and debate on the participation and organizational power of the current communities in the generation of spaces of coexistence, solidarity and integration that promote respect for diversity, and the change, both in its structure as well as in its dynamics and contents. Presentations were organized according to six conference themes:
Diaz and Reich contributed two posters: (a) Exploring Access to Services for Head Start Parents: Differences for Latino Parents and (b) Language as a Gatekeeper to Community Research. Diaz presented her research with Alejandra Arce and Sara Buckingham: "Individuals in Context: What Helps Latinx Community Members Thrive across the U.S.?" Abstract As extant literature has generally focused on increased risk for negative psychosocial outcomes and/or applied Eurocentric standards to the study of wellbeing in racial/ethnic minority communities, we explore multi-level factors that instead contribute to positive outcomes in Latinx communities. In this thematic table, we present three papers that examine individual and contextual-levels factors that may directly or indirectly contribute to positive outcomes among Latinx communities in the U.S. Arce found that, in the face of anti-immigrant practices, Latinx parents relied on family, peers, and religious community for support, and built community engagement through advocacy efforts. Buckingham found that both individuals and their communities contributed to Latinx immigrants’ acculturation processes through their sense of community and intergroup anxiety. Finally, in a primarily Latinx sample, Diaz and Reich found that minority families vary in their perceptions and satisfaction with their home environment and suggest that increased social support may be an accidental benefit of high household density for these families. Collectively, these papers demonstrate the value of examining multi-level factors when seeking to understand the mechanisms through which racial/ethnic minority communities experience positive outcomes in the face of adversity. Participants will discuss implications of these results for actions across these multiple levels.
School of Education faculty and doctoral students are presenting at the 2018 Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Special Topics Character Development Meeting in Philadelphia, October 18-20.
SRCD "brings together developmental scientists, philosophers, educators, and practitioners to advance theory, research, and program practices pertinent to understanding character development as it occurs within and across the key settings of youth development. The program is expected to feature, among other topics, findings from longitudinal studies of character, work by biologists and epigenetic researchers who study social genomics and the mutually influential relations between individual and context, and practitioners within family, school, and out-of-school settings whose programs seek to promote character development. Other topics will include sessions that focus on the development of measures of character development that reflect both change-sensitive and context-specific aspects of character, including its cultural variation, and evaluation strategies for assessing programs designed to promote character virtue development" (https://www.srcd.org/). The 2018 special topics theme is Promoting Character Development Among Diverse Children and Adolescents: The Roles of Families, Schools, and Out-Of-School-Time Youth Development Programs. 2018 Presentations by SoE faculty and doctoral students (alphabetically by title) Title: Activity Participation and Performance Character Virtues from 4th to 6th Grade: Exploring the Bidirectional Processes Authors: Yangyang Liu, Sandra Simpkins, Deborah Vandell Title: Effects of After-School Programs in Promoting Performance Character: A Systematic Meta-Analysis Authors: Yangyang Liu, Ta-yang Hsieh, Stephanie Soto-Lara, Sandra Simpkins, Deborah Vandell, Hua Luo Title: Contributions of Academic Efficacy and Goal Orientations to Learning Gains and Interest during a Challenging Mathematics Lesson Authors: Emily McLaughlin Lyons, Tyler Warner, Lindsey Richland Title: Sports Participation and The Development of Performance Virtues: Dynamic Relations from Childhood through Early Adolescence Authors: Nicole Zarrett, Yangyang Liu, Sandra Simpkins, Deborah Vandell, Jacquelynne Eccles In addition, Deborah Vandell is chairing the keynote address session Positive Parenting and Positive Development in Children: A Business Plan, and Sandra Simpkins is moderating the session Organized After-School Activities and Character Development: A Conversation with Experts on the Field and Future Directions. Alumni presentations Title: Effects of a Purpose for Learning Mindset Intervention on Low-Income High School Students’ College Readiness Authors: Jill Gandhi, Tyler W. Watts, Michael D. Masucci, C. Cybele Raver Title: PreK Children’s Academic Orientations: A New Child Survey Measure Authors: Erik Ruzek, Jamie Jirout, Katerina Schenke, Virginia Vitiello, Jessica Vick Whittaker, Robert C Pianta Program Guide Distinguished Professor Jacquelynne Eccles is presenting at the 8th Annual Gender Development Research Conference, sponsored by the University of California, Santa Cruz, in San Francisco, October 18. The event is one of the major international psychology conferences on gender roles.
Professor Eccles is in a special symposium with two other "mothers" of the psychology of gender and women’s studies at University of California, Los Angeles - Irene Frieze, now at the University of Pittsburgh, and Diane Ruble, now at New York University - and of psychology more generally. In discussing the topic "Looking Back at the First Feminist Psychology of Women Textbook", they will be talking about their historical perspectives on the field of gender studies within the field of psychology over the last 50 years. In addition to her interest in gender development, Professor Eccles also researches academic motivation and achievement, school and family influences on adolescent development, and gender and ethnicity in STEM fields. Alumna Teya Rutherford (Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University; PhD in Education, 2014) is first author on a paper accepted for publication in Applied Cognitive Psychology: "Links between Achievement, Executive Functions, and Self-Regulated Learning." Co-authors are Martin Buschkuehl (MIND Institute) and Professors Susanne Jaeggi and George Farkas.
Abstract Student self‐regulated learning (SRL) is theorized to draw upon cognitive resources such as executive functions (EF) in support of planning, monitoring, and control processes in the service of academic goals. Prior work has demonstrated connections between direct measures of EF and reports of regulation behaviors, but this has not been frequently extended using an SRL framework to classroom behaviors and resulting school achievement. We find relations between inhibition and shifting elements of EF and teacher reports of SRL and links between both and student achievement on standardized tests and classroom grades in mathematics and language arts. We also find that links between EF and math achievement are partially mediated through SRL. Our results suggest that aspects of EF can support or may be a bottleneck for SRL and thus academic achievement, and as such, they have implications for cognitive and educational interventions. Rutherford, T., Buschkuehl, M., Jaeggi, S. M., & Farkas, G. (in press.). Links between achievement, executive functions, and self-regulated learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology. PhD alumna Nancy Tsai is first author on a paper accepted for publication by Brain and Cognition: "Stress and Executive Control: Mechanisms, Moderators, and Malleability." Co-authors are Professors Jacquelynne Eccles and Susanne Jaeggi.
Dr. Tsai received her PhD in Education in 2018. Shehas accepted a position as a postdoctoral scholar in the Neuroscience Research Laboratory, working with Dr. John Gabrieli, at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Abstract Stress pervades everyday life and more importantly, affects prefrontal cortices that support executive control functions, processes that are critical to learning and memory as well as a range of life outcomes. The positive or negative effect of stress on cognition depends on an interaction of factors related to the situation and the individual. Research has shown that psychological characteristics related to self-relevance and the availability of resources may lead individuals to perceive a stressor as a threat or challenge, driving performance outcomes. Given that perception is arguably the key to stress reactivity, positive affect and self-belief constructs are discussed in the context of how they may lead to preserved performance in the face of stress. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of stress perception could inform the development of interventions, a socially important endeavor given the impact of stress on health and cognitive functions. Tsai, N., Eccles, J. S., & Jaeggi, S. M. (in press.). Stress and executive control: Mechanisms, moderators, and malleability. Brain and Cognition. PhD student Rhenzhe Yu has been honored with an "Outstanding Research Award" from the National Forum on Empirical Educational Research in China. The award is granted each year to ten published research papers from across the country. Mr. Yu's paper, authored in collaboration with Wei Ha -- "How Much is an Improved School Worth? Evidence from the Comprehensive Reform in Compulsory Education in Beijing" -- was one of 146 submissions considered for the ten 2018 awards.
Mr. Yu is a second year PhD in Education student specializing in Language, Literacy, and Technology. His research interests include learning analytics, learning sciences, instructional design, technology and education, and computational modeling. He is advised by Professor Mark Warschauer. Abstract In recent years, there has been a mushrooming of studies that estimate the capitalization effect of school quality into home values in China. However, these studies have not tackled the endogeneity issue well. Our study takes advantage of a reasonably exogenous comprehensive reform in compulsory education in Beijing and a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the housing price premium of school quality in Beijing. Our findings show that the first three waves of reform-induced improvement in school quality are on average associated with a 1. 2% increase in housing prices within the attendance zones of the improved schools. It takes more than one year before this effect to become noticeable. The effects were much larger and appear much faster for the first wave of the improved schools and for small apartments. These results imply that the benefits of the reform may be captured by the relative well-off group in the society, which sheds lights on the policy efforts to equalize school resources in China’s compulsory education. Ha, W., & Yu, R. (2017). How Much Is An Improved School Worth? Evidence from the Comprehensive Reform in Compulsory Education in Beijing (in Chinese). Peking University Education Review, 15(03):137-153. [Corresponding author] The School of Education welcomed 820 new and continuing Bachelor of Arts in Education Sciences (BAES) students on September 24th. Sixty-six (66) percent (540) of UCI's BAES students entered the program as "first generation" students - the first member of their family to pursue a university degree. Forty-eight (48) percent (395) have identified as an Under Represented Minority (URM) student. Forty-one (41) percent (335) have chosen to pursue a double major. During welcome week orientation, SoE Student Affairs staff and current BAES students described the support and networking opportunities available to undergraduates. They encouraged new freshmen to explore the four SoE-sponsored, student-administered clubs for BAES majors: Teachers of Tomorrow, Club Lightbulb, Bilingual Teacher Student Association, and Kappa Delta Pi Honor Society, described below.
SoE Student Affairs has introduced two new support activities this fall that offer first generation and transfer students opportunities to talk with counselors and network with fellow students.
UCI's Bachelor of Arts in Education Sciences was introduced in 2014 and currently is the third most popular major on the UCI campus. As of Summer 2018, over 1,000 undergraduates have received their BAES degree. Nina Huynh Ly is the 2018-2019 president of Club Lightbulb, which is devoted to building relationships among Anteaters and developing and exploring empowering, holistic outlooks on education. Now in her senior year, Nina is double majoring in Philosophy and English. She shared her thoughts about her educational experiences. October 2018 Education has always been a rocky pathway for me. I knew that I wanted to go to college but did not know what I wanted to do after college-that is until I heard about Club Lightbulb (formerly SCTA at UCI). I grew up in Los Angeles and in the LA Unified School District for the majority of my school career. I went to a STEM-based magnet high school where more emphasis and importance is placed upon the sciences and mathematics. I had an interest in and fully respected the STEM fields but personally did not enjoy going into the deep ends of it. When college applications came around and it came time to choose a major, I felt compelled to follow the current of the school but decided to swim against it. Fast forward to my first year in college, I am a Philosophy major and starting to craft a slight inkling of spreading my joy of philosophy to high school students. Many student whom I have encountered on campus exclaim their frustration and distaste for philosophy after taking one of the many introductory courses, most, if not all, of whom have had no prior exposure to philosophy when taking the course. However, this inkling was just that. I did not delve any deeper into my interest of teaching until a friend of mine, the past President of Club Lightbulb, introduced me to the organization. Whenever I was in the club and with other members, most of whom are interested in teaching, I started to understand myself more, and saw that teaching is definitely a pathway I want to explore more in depth. Although I am not declared as an Education Sciences major, my deep connection with Club Lightbulb and the other education organizations provided me the space and time to discover more on where my interests, strengths, and weaknesses lie, and how I can use it to find my footing into the future. Every time I think of what my future may entail, especially the journey towards being an educator, I always look back to and remember the joy I had in the classroom with my 12th grade AP English Literature teacher. He was one of the few teachers who is very passionate (and shows it well) about English Literature and poetry. His enthusiasm when someone finds something new in a poem that he never thought about previously shines across the room, and I could feel that English literature and poetry is not just another subject that has to be taught to 12th graders-it is the stem of his passion. This is the sort of feeling I want students to feel when learning about Philosophy and all other subjects. Educators can make or break a student’s passion and curiosity in a subject. It is their job to cultivate an environment of growth and development - and I want to be a part of this metamorphosis. With the unconscientious help from Club Lightbulb and SCTA, I have come to walk the path of educating in the Language department. I hope to aid in crystallizing students’ multicultural views of the world, and (not be afraid to) reach out and learn about other people in the world. I believe the first and most important stage that must be taken is language. Through language, one can reach people-and through people, you can reach culture and new worlds.
Senior Esmeralda (Esmi) Martin is combining a double major in Education Sciences and Psychology & Social Behavior with service activities as a School of Education Peer Academic Advisor, President of the Kappa Delta Pi (KDP) School of Education Honor Society, and Undergraduate Research Assistant in the Baby Books 2 Lab. Below she share her thoughts about education and her academic journey. October 2018 I knew at a young age that I was going to attend college. Although neither my parents nor my siblings attended college, I was always expected to pursue a higher education and study something I loved. So I started brainstorming what I wanted to be when I grew up. In 3rd grade I wanted to be an author for children’s books. I asked my teacher what I had to do to accomplish my dreams, and she told me I had to get good grades in school and go to college. From then on I knew I had to study hard and exceed academically to fulfill my goals. Eventually, as I got older, my dreams changed, and when I finally had the opportunity to apply to college, I was set on becoming a teacher. During high school I had volunteered at my elementary school in a kindergarten class, and I absolutely loved it. I loved helping the students and being a part of their learning and education. UCI was a perfect choice for me because it had a major in Education, unlike other UCs in the system. At first, transitioning to UCI from my very small, rural hometown was very difficult, but as I got more comfortable on campus, I began to join clubs, volunteered in research labs, and even applied for a campus job. Currently, I am President of the KDP honor society of the School of Education and a Peer Academic Advisor in the Education Student Affairs office. Both of my positions have given me the opportunity to influence the possible educators of the future and help my peers find their passion. It is my duty to advise them about campus resources and inform them on certain opportunities that will benefit their overall experience here at UCI. My experience at UCI had a rocky beginning, but as I continued getting involved in the School of Education, I met people who were willing to support me. Through my positions in the School of Education I have the ability to do the same for my peers. UCI has given me the ability to influence, explore, and succeed. UCI allowed me to explore all the possibilities in which I could help children succeed. As I took a couple development courses and got involved in research in the School of Education, I found that research was the best way for me to have a larger, positive influence. I have been an undergraduate research assistant for the Baby Books 2 lab since my second year of college, and it has been such an amazing experience. I love being a small part of a larger project that can influence the way children learn, grow, and experience the world. I also had the opportunity to conduct my own research project through the support of UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program) and SURP (Summer Undergraduate Research Program). My project focused on the way Latino parents use mobile technologies to manage their young children’s behavior. Conducting my own research project really gave me hands-on experience with designing the project and interacting with the participants. From this research I discovered how much I enjoyed working with families that are very similar to my own. My parents both migrated here from Mexico and experienced a lot of hardship, which has been a main motivator for me throughout my life. Although my parents worked very hard, our economic standing and rural, small town location made resources very difficult to find and acquire. Unfortunately, many ethnically diverse parents could very likely be going through similar situations. Therefore, I would like to attend graduate school and become a professor to dedicate time to research in helping parents such as mine, with the goal of giving them resources and information on how to support every aspect of their children’s development.
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