Current Student Dissertation Projects:
Priyanka Agarwal
Dissertation Title: [Re]imagining Student Mathematical Engagement through Problem Posing Pedagogy
About: The study uses researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) model to design, implement and examine math instructional lessons and pedagogy, centered on mathematical problem-posing (as against just problem-solving), in a predominantly working class Latinx neighborhood middle-school. This qualitative study has two goals: (1) understanding the challenges and affordances of establishing problem posing as a central feature of classroom instruction, and (2) identifying the ways in which problem posing promotes student engagement and learning. The findings will serve to provide preliminary ideas of problem-posing pedagogy’s potential to challenge the deeply-rooted discourse of poverty and deficits in education.
David Liu
Dissertation Title: Designing After School Science Programs to Connect Schools, Homes, and Communities.
About: The purpose of this study is to investigate how to develop science after school programs that support the deep and meaningful STEM engagement of girls of color. This project will focus on how to empirically test design features in a research practice partnership with a local school.
Doron Zinger
Dissertation Title: Learning Affordances for Teachers and Students in a Summer Lab School
About: I examine an alternative teacher certification program aimed at preparing primarily Latinx and African American teacher candidates for instruction in segregated urban schools. In this project I work closely with first year teachers as they prepare and begin teaching in their own classroom to identify ways of improving urban science teacher preparation and opportunities for students to meaningfully engage with and learn science.
Alumni Dissertation Projects:
Tara Barnhart
Dissertation Title: Participation in a Video Club: Influences on Teachers and Teaching, Students and Learning
About: This study investigates the critical discourses developed by high school science teachers engaged in a semester-long video club professional development series. The focus of the video club was to enhance participants’ abilities to facilitate students’ thinking and reasoning in science.
Huy Chung
Dissertation Title: Appropriating and Enacting Literacy Teaching Practices in the Context of the Pathway Project Professional Development Program
About: In this study, I investigate the types of pedagogical tools middle school English teachers take up and adapt from literacy professional development. Moreover, I am also interested in how these tools shape their own learning as well as their students’ learning. Finally, I also seek to understand
cognitive and contextual factors that may influence how teachers are enacting these tools in their classrooms.
Janet Garcia-Mercado
Dissertation Title: Broadening participation in mathematics for students from non-dominant backgrounds: The relationship between teacher practice, noticing and pedagogical commitments
About: This study draws on the construct of teacher noticing to examine how teachers attend to and reason about classroom features that influence learning opportunities for non-dominant groups. Just as research examines how teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and identities influence their practice, I use the lens of noticing to explain the cognitive processes teachers use engaging in these teaching practices. Through this work, I seek to make explicit the noticing of secondary mathematics teachers and the relationship between their noticing, practices and pedagogical commitments.
Sarah Gilliland
Dissertation Title: Physical Therapist Students’ Clinical Reasoning and Characterizations of Practice
About: This study investigates how doctor of physical therapy students engage in clinical problem solving. Specifically, I examine the types of problems students frame and solve during an encounter with a patient and how their perspectives on practice influence their clinical decision making.
Jessica Tunney
Dissertation Title: A Model of Professional Development for Field-Based Teacher Educators: Addressing Historical Problems Through Local Collaboration
About: This dissertation examines a professional development intervention that brought together university supervisors of student teaching with partner classroom mentor teachers to develop a shared vision of mathematics instruction and shared approaches to mentoring pre-service teachers in the field. The study contributes to practice-based teacher education by offering a model design university-school collaborations aimed at supporting pre-service teachers in connecting learning across university and field site settings.
Cathery Yeh
Dissertation Title: A Longitudinal Investigation of Beginning Teachers’ Conceptions and Enactments of Equity-Minded Mathematics Practices
About: This study examines the factors that impact the retention and attrition of culturally and linguistically diverse elementary school teachers and support or impede their development and implementation of reform-based, equity-minded mathematics practices.
Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program
Jazmin Cruz and Haley Desales, working under the direction of Jenell Krishnan and Judith Sandholtz, completed a project titled “The NGSS Era: Understanding Rural Elementary Teachers Science Instruction.” The research will be presented at the 2019 annual symposium of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.
Stephany Echavarria, working under the direction of Jenell Krishnan and Mark Warschauer, completed a project titled “Understanding Group Dynamics during Online Synchronous Collaborative Writing in Middle School.” The research will be presented at the 2019 annual symposium of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.
Jazmin Cruz, Carolyne Villaescusa, and Jennifer Nguyen, under the direction of Judith Sandholtz and Doron Zinger, completed a research project titled: Factors Influencing Science Instructional Decisions of Rural Elementary School Teachers and presented it at the UROP symposium in May 2018.