Reich is a community psychologist studying contexts that support children’s development. Her research focuses on children’s direct and technologically mediated interactions with family, peers, and educational settings. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Society for Community Research and Action. Reich is director of UCI's Development in Social Context Lab (DISC) and Associate Dean of UCI’s Graduate Program.
Abstract Texting is used by many adolescents and has the potential to improve well-being, as youth can reach out for support immediately after experiencing a stressful situation. Many studies have examined whether texting is associated with well-being, but few have used experimental designs, preventing causal claims. In this experimental study, 130 adolescents (Mage = 12.41) participated with a same-gender friend whom they texted regularly. Both adolescents completed a task that elicited stress and then engaged in one of the following randomly assigned activities: texting their friend, watching a video on a cellphone (passive-phone condition), or sitting quietly (no activity condition). Participants reported their mood and stress levels after the stress task and again after the activity. Heart rate variability was measured throughout. Participants who texted their friend reported higher moods (b = −.80, standard error [SE] = .24, p < .001, ηp2 = .09) and lower stress at the end of the study than those in the no activity condition (b = .51, SE = .25, p = .046, ηp2 = .04) and higher moods than adolescents in the passive-phone condition (b = −.74, SE = .25, p = .004, ηp2 = .08). No differences were noted between the passive-phone and no activity conditions. There were no differences in heart rate variability between the three conditions. The effects of texting on mood, self-reported stress, and heart rate variability did not differ by gender.
To understand instruction during the spring 2020 transition to emergency distance learning (EDL), we surveyed a sample of instructors teaching undergraduate EDL courses at a large university in the southwest. We asked them how frequently they used and how confident they were in their ability to implement each of nine promising practices, both for their spring 2020 EDL course and a time when they previously taught the same course face-to-face (F2F). Using latent class analysis, we examined how behavioral frequencies and confidence clustered to form meaningful groups of instructors, how these groups differed across F2F and EDL contexts, and what predicted membership in EDL groupings. Results suggest that in the EDL context, instructors fell into one of three profiles in terms of how often they used promising practices: Highly Supportive, Instructor Centered, and More Detached. When moving from the F2F to EDL context, instructors tended to shift “down” in terms of their profile—for example, among F2F Highly Supportive instructors, 34% shifted to the EDL Instructor Centered profile and 30% shifted to the EDL More Detached Profile. Instructors who reported lower self-efficacy for EDL practices were also more likely to end up in the EDL More Detached profile. These results can assist universities in understanding instructors' needs in EDL, and what resources, professional development, and institutional practices may best support instructor and student experiences.
Renick is the recipient of a 2021 Public Impact Fellowship to facilitate a youth-participatory action research project in partnership with a local middle school. Renick is specializing in Human Development in Context (HDiC). Professor Reich serves as her advisor.
Abstract Efforts to transform educational systems advocate for shifting and expanding the voices of those who generate research. This study was part of a project that brought together mathematics teachers, youth workers, and researchers to create equity-centered noticing frameworks for mathematics instruction. We explore youth workers’ understandings of the relationship between local educational equity problems and larger structural forces. By applying the framework of critical bifocality, we explore how youth workers demonstrate praxis where their pedagogical responses are animated by an understanding of the inherent linkages between broad social, economic, and political forces and educational equity issues in the local community.
Abstract
Having rich and complex vocabulary is a crucial component that contributes to the quality of writing for academic purposes. However, use of academic vocabulary can be challenging for adolescent L2 writers who are developing their academic language proficiency. Thus, understanding lexical needs of adolescent L2 students in composing academic essays is pivotal in supporting this population in their endeavor to become proficient academic writers. This study investigates the lexical features of adolescent L2 students’ text-based analytical essays and analyzes the extent to which lexical density, lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication predict the quality of their writing. Computational tools Coh-Metrix and VocabProfiler were used to obtain quantitative measures of lexical density, diversity, and sophistication. The results of the study indicate that the essays (n = 70), on average, have (1) low lexical density, (2) more repetition of words indicating less diversity compared to grade-level estimates, and (3) a higher percentage of basic words and lower percentage of academic words. 44 % of the AWL words in the essays come from the source text and prompt. The results of multiple hierarchical regression indicate that the use of academic vocabulary is a predictor of writing quality. The study has important pedagogical implications for classroom practice at secondary school. “Mobile app features that scaffold pre‐school learning: Verbal feedback and leveling designs”4/22/2021
As a doctoral student she specialized Learning, Teaching, Cognition, and Development (LTCD). Reich served as her advisor.
Reich is a community psychologist studying contexts that support children’s development. Her research focuses on children’s direct and technologically mediated interactions with family, peers, and educational settings. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Society for Community Research and Action. Reich is director of UCI's Development in Social Context Lab (DISC) and Associate Dean of UCI’s Graduate Program. Abstract Guiding hints and challenge can help scaffold learners to progress beyond what they would achieve independently. The interactive and adaptive capabilities of mobile devices allow educational applications (apps) to support learning through scaffolding designs. However, little research has tested the effects of scaffolding features in apps on young children’s learning. Using a 3 × 2 between‐subjects design, this study experimentally tests how three types of app feedback (nonverbal sounds, verbal encouragement, or scaffolded verbal hints) and two types of leveling (gradual vs. random‐ordered challenge) influence 4–5‐year‐old children’s learning of novel words (N = 240). Results showed that scaffolded feedback was especially useful when provided at the beginning of app play (p < .01), and scaffolded leveling through gradual increases in difficulty supported faster and more accurate responses than random order challenge (p < .001). Both boys and girls may benefit from texting a friend after experiencing a stressful event.
In recent decades, philosophy has been identified as a general approach to enhance the maturity of higher education as a field of study by enriching theory and method. In this article, I offer a new set of philosophical recommendations to spur the disciplinary development of higher education, departing from previous work in several meaningful ways. Due to their deep and useful connections to higher education research, philosophy of measurement, virtue epistemology, and Bayesian epistemology are introduced and discussed in relation to their conceptual association and potential practical influence on the study of higher education. The culmination of these points signals a learner-centered lens focused on the development of students.
""Transforming everyday information into practical analytics with crowdsourced assessment tasks4/19/2021
His core research interest is understanding how technology, information, and co-designing solutions with the community, can enhance the way we learn and deliver education. Ahn co-designs technology with community partners for diverse learning contexts. He has engaged in research-practice partnerships around emerging technologies including social media, alternate reality games, and data visualization platforms. He serves as faculty director of Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN) and a member of the Connected Learning Lab (DLL) at UCI. Currently, he is editor of Educational Researcher. Nguyen is specializing in Teaching, Learning, and Educational Improvement (TLEI) for her doctoral work. Her research interests include design of STEM learning experiences and multimodal assessment to study collaboration and conceptual understanding. She is advised by Professors Mark Warschauer and Rossella Santagata.
Abstract Educators use a wide variety of data to inform their practices. Examples of these data include forms of information that are commonplace in schools, such as student work and paper-based artifacts. One limitation in these situations is that there are less efficient ways to process such everyday varieties of information into analytics that are more usable and practical for educators. To explore how to address this constraint, we describe two sets of design experiments that utilize crowdsourced tasks for scoring open-ended assessments. Developing crowdsourced systems and their resulting analytics introduced a variety of challenges, such as attending to the expertise and learning of the crowd. In this paper, we describe the potential efficacy of design decisions such as screening the crowd, providing multimedia instruction, and asking the crowd to explain their answers. We also explore the potential of crowdsourcing as a learning opportunity for those participating in the collective tasks. Our work offers key design implications for leveraging crowdsourcing to process educational data in ways that are relevant to educators, while offering learning experiences for the crowd. "The S.P.A.C.E Hypothesis: Physical Activity as Medium — Not Medicine — for Public Health Impact"4/16/2021
Abstract
Most scientifically tested physical activity interventions end when research funding ends; interventions that last struggle to sustain benefits. We hypothesize that long-term public health impact will benefit from a shift in how interventionists conceptualize physical activity—from a form of medicine, of value for its innate health benefits, to a malleable medium, of value for the dynamic contexts it creates.
Gülseven's research focuses on parental, cultural, and contextual correlates of prosocial behaviors and moral development in children and adolescents. She is collaborating with Drs. Sandra Simpkins, Deborah Lowe Vandell, Jacquelynne Eccles, and Nicole Zarrett in the Templeton Character Development Project to explore the development of five character virtues including prosocial behavior, cooperative behavior, self-control, emotion regulation, and hard work from childhood through adolescence. Gülseven received her B.S. in Psychology from Abant İzzet Baysal University, in Turkey and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Science from the University of Missouri.
Carlo’s primary research interest focuses on understanding positive social development and health in culturally diverse children and adolescents. Many of his projects focus on U.S. ethnic/racial groups, including Latino/a youth and families. He has published more than 200 books, chapters, and research papers. He currently serves as a member of the Society for Research in Child Development Governing Council, as associate editor of the International Journal of Behavioral Development, and as co-editor of the upcoming APA Handbook of Adolescent Development. Carlo serves as director of UCI’s Cultural Resilience and Learning Center. Abstract The present study aimed to investigate the intervening role of anxiety symptoms in relations between self-regulation and multiple forms of prosocial behaviors in U.S. Latino/a college students. The sample is based on data from a cross-sectional study on college students’ health and adjustment. Participants were 249 (62% women; M age =20 years; 86% U.S. born) college students who self-identified as Latino/a. College students self-reported on their self-regulation, anxiety symptoms, and types and targets of prosocial behaviors using online surveys. Path analyses were conducted to test direct and indirect associations among the study variables. Self-regulation was directly and indirectly associated with several types of prosocial behaviors via anxiety symptoms. The hypothesized associations also differed by the target of helping. Our findings underscore a strengths-based view of the coping and mental health resources that predict positive well-being among U.S. Latino/a college students.
Abstract
Due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, universities were forced to adopt a remote learning model, which introduced a number of stressors into college students' everyday life and study habits. The current study investigates if students' study‐related stress increased after the pandemic's onset and how individual and contextual factors moderate this potential stress increase. Longitudinal survey data about students' stress levels and self‐efficacy in self‐regulation were collected before and after the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic at a public university (N = 274). Regression analysis results show an overall increase in study‐related stress levels after the onset of the pandemic. Students with self‐efficacy in self‐regulation reported lower stress increases; students with higher mental health impairment and limited time for coursework reported larger stress increases. To address students' stress levels and strengthen coping resources, universities should consider providing students with resources to improve their self‐regulation and time‐management skills. |