Doctoral student grantees
Keith Bowen: Virtual Student Exchange: Contact Theory in Online Learning Environments
This project uses contact theory to explore how a virtual international exchange experience might help break down negative biases and build positive attitudes. Student exchange is widely recognized for its value to promote generational change. However, in-person student exchange is an expensive and demanding form of educational experience, one more often available to students from high-income countries, and one that requires even these students to have substantial means and flexibility to live far from home for extended periods of time. We use new media and technology to connect two classes of future PreK-12 teachers, one at a state university in Northern California, U.S., and the other at a comparable university in Beirut, Lebanon, developing a new pedagogical model we call Virtual Student Exchange. TELOS will support a study of the exchange program’s impact in reducing stereotypes and improving attitudes among students who participate, in comparison to a control group.
Matthew Kelly: Unequal by Design: Public Policy, Space, and the Roots of Educational Inequality
Leveraging new geospatial technologies, “Unequal by Design” investigates the roots of inequality between school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Examining the period between 1850 and 1950, this project traces the creation, redefinition, and movement of school district boundaries in the past so that education scholars, policymakers, and practitioners can better address educational inequality in the present. This project seeks to create important historical data that supports continued calls for more equitable school funding.
Jing Liu: Measuring Teacher Practices and Their Impact Using “Text as Data” Methods
The project uses novel “text as data” methods to analyze transcripts of classroom videos by leveraging computational power. I use data from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which recorded videos of teachers in 310 schools in six districts serving high poverty student populations. Using transcriptions of classroom videos, I apply several “text as data” methods, including Structural Topic Modelling (STM), “bag of words,” and sentiment analysis to create metrics of teacher-student interaction patterns and their language features. By linking those measures to multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, this research aims to generate knowledge on why some teachers are more effective than others and how to improve teacher effectiveness particularly for students most in need of high quality instruction. This research also provides a demonstration of how to use computational social science methods to study teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms.
Masters Student Grantees
Ali Azhar
This project will be implemented at Banyan, a technology-enabled school in a village in Pakistan. It is a school I co-founded and currently educates 100 children aged 4-9. It is a low-income area and the children are educated free of cost. While children in the community hardly ever get exposed to English language, all competitive exams and jobs require it as a prerequisite. I will create a virtual sandbox, where people separated by distance, language or culture can engage in imaginary play through collaborative (virtual or immersive) spaces, tangible objects and co-creation of stories to support English language development. Specifically the tool seeks to develop “outside in” literacy skills in English, based on sociocultural theories of literacy.
Maya Sussman
The principal goal of this project is to help immigrant parents of K-12 students develop the self-efficacy and linguistic proficiency necessary to converse confidently in English within the contexts that are common in their daily lives. By transforming their existing everyday encounters with English speakers into low-risk learning opportunities, we aim to help learners boost their English proficiency, and ultimately widen their opportunities to support their children and participate in their education.
Fabio Campos & Leiny Garcia
ThinkCommunity will be designed to convert a community into a learning environment where students learn how to take on challenges, and ultimately working to change their surroundings. By forming communities of mappers that share stories and real challenges across neighborhoods, the platform will foster the development of digital literacies, incentivize creative solutions for real problems and open space for new voices to be heard. The platform will also serve as a repository of narratives and potential projects that can be harnessed by local schools and community centers. ThinkCommunity seeks to develop citizenship, leadership and civic education among adolescents from disenfranchised communities, help them develop a critical stance towards present conditions and, ultimately, open space for change.
Casey Ulrich
ConquerED is a technology that aims to teach students the power of setting a goal, creating strategies to help them achieve that goal, and reflecting on the learning process, derived from the paper-based process I used in the classroom. The culture of power in schools equips those from mainstream culture backgrounds to navigate schooling more easily than those from non-dominant backgrounds. By coaching students to think about their actions and reflect on them, we hope that what is currently hidden from students can be made clear in order to ensure all students have the opportunity to learn at the highest levels. Our goal is for every student to develop a set of strategies that help them become confident learners and propel them to success in school, college, and career.
Julia Rubin
Research suggests that teacher feedback on student writing can be a powerful force for learning. For students in urban and under-resourced schools, the likelihood of receiving feedback they cannot effectively implement is higher than middle-class, predominantly white schools, resulting in less effective acquisition of writing skills over time. The goal of my project is to build a tracking tool that collects teacher comments on student writing and provides dashboard data about the types of feedback a teacher gives to individual students over time as well as trends in teacher feedback to an entire class. I will adapt the Lacuna Stories platform for writing, rather than reading, in service of teachers developing personalized writing instruction for students based on a portfolio of their work.
Kimiya Hojjat & Aliza Hoffman
Disparities in access to quality comprehensive sex education largely correlate to factors related to race and income across the country. Candid is a mobile tool for facilitating difficult conversations around relationships, sexuality, and decision-making between parents and children aged ~10-12 years old. By leveraging inquiry-based learning theory and human-centered design principles, Candid seeks to enable parents to foster productive conversations about growing up, while helping their kids think critically and make informed decisions about their well-being and relationships. As of today only 24 out of 50 states in the US mandate that schools provide comprehensive sex education. We want to fill in the gaps by empowering parents to proactively lead this learning experience in a thoughtful, engaging, and candid way.
