2017 TELOS Doctoral Student Grantees

Hiep Ho — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 21:34:29 +0000

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.

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Student Grantees

2016 TELOS Doctoral Student Grantees

Hiep Ho — Fri, 08 Jul 2016 17:25:37 +0000

Chris Proctor

My project proposes to treat Computer Science as a literacy, and explores whether pedagogies designed for English/Language Arts could also be effective for teaching Computer Science. I will use a design-based approach to develop a web-based platform for reading and writing interactive fiction, a genre of participatory stories somewhere between story and game. Interactive Fiction combines elements such as conditional branching, loops, variables, and functions, and so could be an ideal way of introducing students to Computer Science as a literacy. There is a broad call to make Computer Science part of primary and secondary education. This project could help connect Computer Science to other well-established literacies within a school curriculum.

Holly Pope

The purpose of my study is to examine the interactions of underserved students with their teacher and each other as the class engages in playing the digital game Wuzzit Trouble on iPads. With a combination of video, classroom observations, and student interviews, I will shed light on the affordances of barriers to learning from complex digital games within classroom environment. I will also measure the development of mathematical thinking and number sense using a pre-post written assessment. The goal is to bring attention to the varied ways of children experience digital math games in the classroom.

Soren Rosier

Peer tutoring – one type of peer assisted learning – has been found to increase learning for both tutors and tutees and spur more positive attitudes toward subject matter. However, studies continually find that tutors tend to do much more explaining than tutees, use shallow or procedural questioning, and rarely stimulate deep-level reasoning or monitor the understanding of tutees. With the aid of technology, I hope to facilitate peer tutor training that prepares tutors to use research-based talk moves and shifts their conceptions of good teaching – and eventually their behaviors – from knowledge-telling to strategic questioning and from didactic to dialogic teaching.

Aekta Shah

Technological innovation is transforming the flow of information, the impact of social action, and is giving birth to new forms of bottom up innovation that are capable of expanding and exploding old theories of reproduction and resistance because “smart mobs”, “street knowledge”, and “social movements” cannot be neutralized by powerful structural forces in the same old ways. This research will investigate the concept of YPAR 2.0 (Akom, 2016) in which new technologies enable young people to visualize, validate, and transform social inequalities by using local knowledge + technology in new ways that deepen engagement, democratize data, expand educational opportunity, inform policy, and mobilize community assets. Specially this research aims to investigate how a digital technology –a mobile, mapping and SMS platform called Streetwyze- may impact youth/community sense of agency, self-esteem, civic/educational engagement, environmental stewardship, and investment in community.

Xavier Monroe

To determine if culturally responsive STEM learning activities during summer months can serve as interventions for underrepresented youth, I will investigate how culturally responsive interventions influence students’ participation and motivation related to STEM, and what key experiences and associated factors encourage student agency with respect to their learning and persistence in STEM. The TELOS-funded project will support me in offering a summer STEM opportunity for local middle school students, also explore whether students transfer acquired interests to their formal learning environment during the academic school year. The study will also build off work that considered how a group of urban elementary school instructors made sense of a new district STEAM policy (STEM with Arts included). This research aims to advance discovery and understanding by designing to transform student learning, training, and teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), particularly using Robotics Technology.