Penner studies educational inequality and policy, and considers the ways that policies, districts, schools, teachers, peers, and parents can contribute to or ameliorate educational inequality. She is currently involved in projects examining teacher recruitment and retention in constrained labor and housing markets, how school sorting processes affect student opportunities to learn, and how educator-initiated curricula that center the cultural and historical experiences of traditionally marginalized students impact student outcomes.
From the 10 finalists, four to six scholars will be selected to receive $350,000 over five years in support of their research. For a full list of finalists, please click here. Learn more about Penner’s recent research: Study finds that culturally centered program for Black, male high school students boosts persistence Culturally Responsive Teaching Is Promising. But There’s a Pressing Need for More Research Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale
“My research is intended to have broad policy implications regarding the unintended consequences and benefits of pre-k policies, the potential of utilizing market forces to improve school quality, and the ‘active ingredients’ in later schooling environments that serve to sustain early learning gains,” Zhang said. “Methodologically, my dissertation contributes to the advancement of casually driven research in the field of ECE by using multiple large-scale longitudinal datasets and experimental and quasi-experimental designs.”
The AERA-NSF Grants Program supports highly competitive dissertation research that employs rigorous quantitative methods to examine large-scale, education-related data and advance fundamental knowledge of relevance to STEM policy. Zhang is specializing in Educational Policy and Social Context (EPSC) for her doctoral work. Her research interests include early childhood education, education policy, and program evaluation. She holds a Master of Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis and a Bachelor of Social Work from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. Prior to her enrollment in the doctoral program, she worked as an early childhood home visitor serving disadvantaged immigrant children and families in Chicago. Distinguished Professor George Farkas and Assistant Professor Jade Jenkins serve as Zhang’s co-advisors. “Qing’s dissertation proposal is nothing short of outstanding, examining important, substantively interesting issues in early childhood policy implementation and scale-up,” Jenkins said.
“ISTE 2020 was the absolute best educational technology conference that I have ever attended. I was honored to connect with educators from all over the United States and around the world,” Warren said. “The insights, resources, keynote speakers, games, exhibits, workshops, research, and creation labs were beyond impressive. It is hard to fathom nearly 13,000 people online at the same time – and it worked! I would encourage all educators, tech savvy or not, to attend this amazing conference.”
A former K-12 teacher, coordinator, and administrator, Warren has presented her research on PBL and STEAM at multiple local and national conferences. Warren is the author of two books: Project-Based Learning Across the Disciplines: Plan, Manage, and Assess Through +1 Pedagogy (Corwin) and Cognitive Upgrade: An Educator’s Guide for Shaping Success (Amazon). Warren said she takes pride in resourcing educators with tools that elicit success in schools. ISTE is an international organization committed to “empowering educators and leaders to harness technology to accelerate innovation in teaching and learning.” Membership includes educators from 50 states and 94 foreign countries. Click here for more information about the various workshops held at the weeklong 2020 virtual conference.
In his research, Conchas does not ignore the significant barriers that students face, including limited information, preparation, and advisement that contribute to low four-year college-completion rates. Instead, he places his discussion of systemic barriers within a context of “college-age men and women evincing hope, resistance, and empowerment in the face of marginalization, anti-immigration sentiment, poverty, and an education system that too often reinforces deficit-minded stereotypes.”
“I think it is these most painful experiences that can empower communities to maintain hope, resist inequality and access resources to succeed academically,” said Conchas. For The Chicana/o/x Dream, Conchas and Acevado collected interview data and life testimonios to explore the policies and practices that have inhibited or supported Chicana/o/x success. By identifying community cultural wealth that supports both U.S.-born and U.S. immigrant students of Mexican descent, Conchas calls for better supports to foster the success of Mexican-descent students. Conchas offers key recommendations for higher education administrators to tackle inequality head-on. It is simply not enough to enroll students in higher education, he explains. Instead, they must foster a sense of belonging among Mexican American students, recognizing that “these populations are not monolithic” and honoring the “lived experiences from which these young adults come.” “While diversity and inclusion efforts are common goals in higher education, structures need to be in place that enable students from diverse ethnorace backgrounds to persist and graduate,” Conchas said. “There are a variety of mechanisms that have direct implications for higher education administrators to develop a critical consciousness that dismantles inequality, avoids replicating marginalizing structures, and (re)envisions a socially just reality.” Conchas’s research foci include urban education, sociology of education, and comparative race and ethnicity. He has authored/co-authored nine books addressing the needs and achievements of marginalized youth - The Color of Success: Race and High- Achieving Urban Youth (Teachers College Press): Small Schools and Urban Youth: Using the Power of Culture to Engage Students (Corwin Press), Streetsmart Schoolsmart: Urban Poverty and the Education of Adolescent Boys (Teachers College Press); Cracks in the Schoolyard: Confronting Latino Educational Inequality (Teachers College Press); When School Policies Backfire: How Well-Intended Measures Can Harm Our Most Vulnerable Students (Harvard Education Press); and Inequality, Power, and School Success: Case Studies on Racial Disparity and Opportunity in Education (Routledge). School of Education receives grant to address the needs of housing-insecure and foster youth10/26/2020
“The research we will conduct as a result of this grant is the exact type of work we envisioned when establishing OCEAN,” Arum said. “With a strong network of school sites in place, and funding to study this important, under-researched area, we will improve the educational and living experiences of thousands of housing-insecure and foster youth in our community and identify research-based solutions for the larger field of education nationally.”
“We are honored by the support of the Spencer Foundation and anticipate this grant will help OCEAN to understand the diverse experiences of students who face housing insecurity in Orange County,” Ahn said. “By utilizing partnership and continuous improvement methods, our goal is to understand how to adapt local education systems to better serve these diverse experiences.” The research team will begin collaborating with social services coordinators at Samueli Academy and the Orangewood Foundation to identify a group of best practices that can be shared across schools. In particular, the team will study the diverse experiences of students who are currently experiencing housing insecurity in Orange County, and analyze ways to build from the rich strengths of local educators, neighborhoods, youth, and their families to address systemic obstacles. “We recognize that this is a sensitive area of research, and that time and resources may be challenges for school personnel,” Ahn said. “It is invaluable to have a direct partner such as Samueli Academy that is dedicated to serving the needs of housing-insecure youth, and we are grateful for both their collaboration and the support of the Orangewood Children’s Foundation, Orange County’s leading provider of foster youth services.” “I’m incredibly appreciative of the Spencer Foundation for this opportunity and am beyond excited at the thought of using research and the accumulation of best practices to better serve the needs of foster youth everywhere,” Saba said. Today, Samueli Academy serves more than 650 foster and community youth and boasts a 99 percent high school graduation rate, 92 percent college attendance rate, and is set to open foster youth dorms on-campus in January 2021. There are currently 12 research practice partnerships in the OCEAN network, representing six school districts in Orange County and Southern California. OCEAN donors and grants are supporting 15 graduate student researchers as Community Research Fellows in this upcoming 2020-21 academic year. Chris Wegemer, a fifth-year doctoral candidate and OCEAN community research fellow, has worked with Samueli Academy for the past four years and helped organize the new project funded by the Spencer Foundation. “Housing insecurity was already a problem in local communities before the pandemic, and now the issue is even more pressing,” Wegemer said. “Because of our positionality in one of the largest and most diverse counties in the nation, this initiative has the potential to influence broad policy decisions. It’s an exciting opportunity to do academic work that is centered around achieving equitable outcomes and social impact.” Ahn, who serves as faculty director of OCEAN, studies learning technologies, research-practice partnerships, human-computer interaction, educational technology, and data use and analytics. 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 is director of the School of Education’s Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN). Established in fall 2018, OCEAN is a network of research-practice partnerships between the School of Education and K-12 schools in Orange County. 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.
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. His research interests include learning technologies, research-practice partnerships, human-computer interaction, educational technology, and data use and analytics.
As director of Project Reach, Simpkins guides research examining how families help support high school students’ motivational beliefs in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) as well as how those motivational beliefs, and culturally responsive practices, relate to students’ STEM outcomes.
Simpkins previously served as the chair of the Ph.D. admissions committee for four years, ensuring the school admitted a diverse group of scholars committed to advancing the field of educational science. In 2019, Simpkins was awarded the School of Education Faculty Mentorship Award for Inclusive Excellence in recognition of her significant impact, through formal and informal mentoring, on the success of under-represented minority (URM) students. The APS is the leading international organization dedicated to advancing scientific psychology across disciplinary and geographic borders.
Since the aforementioned project would require significant advances in AI, Doroudi proposed a complementary, two-phase approach that relies on human intelligence.
Phase 1 is an exploratory phase to understand the differences in ability between groups of non-researchers and researchers to complete literature review tasks, determine the ability of non-researchers to find information among different scientific topics, assess training methods, and assess the effects of creating cohorts of individuals that show promise in a specific area of science. In Phase 2, a field study will determine how well the findings in the first phase work when employed in real-world use case literature searches. “The project will assess the viability of creating a paid workforce of trained workers that can help researchers conduct scientific literature searches, but it will also result in a platform to involve interested high school students and undergraduates in this process as citizen scientists,” Doroudi explained. EAGER grants fund projects that NSF considers "high risk – high payoff." Doroudi believes that his EAGER project will prove a novel means for the public to engage with scientific research, and that his research findings should contribute to advances in two additional NSF Idea Machine topics, “Creating Sustainable Education Pathways” and “Reinventing Scientific Talent.” As part of the project, Doroudi plans to specifically target and train high school and undergraduate students who are historically underrepresented in STEM. Doroudi’s research builds on his early work as an intern at Microsoft Research, where he trained crowdworkers to perform complex web search tasks. In subsequent research projects, he recognized the importance of finding related work coming from other disciplines or work that was conducted decades ago. “When I tried different methods of training crowdworkers, I noticed that at times they could complete these tasks more successfully than researchers, and that their performance could improve with small amounts of training.”
Reich will analyze these data to identify which infant and parental characteristics predict media use over time, and how early media exposure and use are associated with parent-child relationship quality and children's language development, social-emotional skills, and executive functioning at 24 and 30 months of age.
“The impacts of television on parent-child interaction and young children's development are well documented, but little is known about how newer screen media influence these processes,” Reich said. “This study will be the first to use a longitudinal design and include diverse families, use mother-report, father-report, and observational measures, and explore what, for how long, and with whom young children engage with digital media.” Research findings will offer concrete recommendations for promoting healthy media use among infants and toddlers. Reich is director of the Development in Social Context Lab (DISC) and serves as Associate Dean of Graduate Programs for the UCI School of Education. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Community Research and Action. Her research interests include child development, parenting, peer interactions, media, and program evaluation with the aim of creating interventions to promote physical and mental health and academic success. Associate professor receives grant to study screen use by young children and parents during COVID-198/25/2020
Reich’s research interests include child development, parenting, peer interactions, media, and program evaluation. Her professional goal is to illuminate how parents and peers affect children’s socio-emotional, cognitive, and physical development with the aim of creating interventions to promote physical and mental health and academic success.
Reich is director of the Development in Social Context Lab (DISC) and serves as Associate Dean of Graduate Programs for the UCI School of Education. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Community Research and Action. Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development is an international nonprofit organization founded in 2013 to understand and address compelling questions regarding media's impact on child development through interdisciplinary dialogue, public information, and rigorous, objective research bridging the medical, neuroscientific, social science, public health, educational, and academic communities. |